Andy,
I think you have the wrong idea when it comes to Eileen’s identity as a communist. People don’t embrace Marxism through scientific analysis or rigorous study, I don’t even think Marx did, there’s something temperamental inside of you that leads you down that path. When you coal miners suffering in southern Illinois you could have blamed the Jews, the blacks and Latinos, you could have said that it was fair, the free market was at play, but instead, you saw class oppression, there’s a piece of you that goes in that direction. You are driven into the politics by something inside of you which, yes, can change but that’s part of who you are, no? When I asked Matti at your soiré why he was an anarchist he gave me a similar answer “I’m an anarchist because I believe in anarchism,” for Matti anarchism wasn’t something he had to develop but he found it inside of him, he had to find the ideology for him. Here’s a Jreg video you may find interesting.
It’s the same with trans people, a lot of them describe going through the world feeling dysmorphic and sad but unsure why, discovering their gender identity is a process of discovery like discovering one’s politics, the temperament is inside of you the whole time, you just need the right conditions (intellectual, material, etc) to bring it out.
I think that Eileen’s communism is just a part of her identity, perhaps there’s a simple answer that Rooney didn’t think to delve into it was important, or assumed that the reader (more me than you) would just have her being red click, I didn’t think anything about it until you mentioned it. I think of how one of the critiques of Blanquism is that socialism wasn’t actually a part of the ideology, they were just temperamentally socialists who enjoyed conspiracy. We’ll have to ask Erik’s opinion on this next week, I think he can help explain it better than I can. Maybe his girlfriend can highlight something for us all too. But I think that Eileen’s communism makes sense, at least to me. I didn’t engage in rigorous scientific research to discover what was the most objectively correct ideology and go from there, Marx didn’t even do that, you and me, we’re temperamentally left-wing and build up our politics from there.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Andrew, thanks for your thoughts and for the JReg YouTube which I watched.
I’m glad you shared your sense of why people believe as they do. My point isn’t to argue you down on this. I’m trying to get at something in our current reality that I never clearly focused on before. For many centuries culture thought in terms of a conversion experience—to a new religion or to some ideology or some ethics or politics or whatever. But the idea was that you were radically transformed. Of course you had to have that potential other self already in you, but you had lots of potential selves in you, and there was the possibility of not realizing, say, the socialist or fascist or atheist or Christian in you. Even so, the fact that you had potential alternate selves potentially within you made it possible to understand those with whom you disagreed. Perhaps like this: I am a mild and restrained person but the guy who goes berserk, rages and gets violent is my alter ego. I can understand him.
In the 19th and 20th centuries great writers and many people of conscience gave us records of this kind of conversion experience. You are suddenly confronted with injustice which you had never seen before. It hits you like a bolt of lightning and you are never the same person again. You drop out. Or you become a communist. Or give away all your money to the poor. Your conversion is to a universally valid truth. I don’t become a pacifist because killing just doesn’t feel right for me but because it’s universally wrong. Conversion was a paradigm. It no doubt applied more or less but it was a fundamental way of thinking about commitment.
Now that paradigm has been replaced by identity. Your example was that a trans was always uncomfortable with being a man. Now she is at home with herself being a woman. My point is that based on the conversion paradigm you would try to change society and convert others. Based on the identity paradigm per se, there is no reason to do either. Do trans people want everyone to be trans? Why should they? If politics is identity, we don’t need to try to change society. It isn’t even possible. We should just stay among our own kind and define the other kind—not as representing other class interests or as harboring false ideology—but as being mean or in some way not nice to our group (racist, homophobic, anti-trans, etc.) And if they accept me as I am, I must do the same for them. What right do I then have to tell the banker or professional soldier not to be what they essentially are? No. I want the military to accept and respect trans people like me. We, too, have a right to deal out death and destruction.
I know of course that in reality the two paradigms overlap. But calling it a paradigm means asking, “If this pattern were dominant, what would the results look like?” The answer to my mind is that everyone would be driven to take maximum offense, but no one would have any interest in winning others over or fundamentally changing social structures. To me, that is the underlying tendency of identity politics. That’s what I was getting at in the short blog. By the way, it seemed to me that Jreg almost entirely ascribed the ideological tendencies of youth to circumstance, not identity.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 