On the Imperative of Niceness

I found a couple of interesting articles by Anselm McGovern for Damage:

• On the Imperative of Niceness, Part One
• Left Populist Affect: On the Imperative of Niceness, Part Twenty-Four

In the first, McGovern suggests that being a “well-adjusted adult” means subordinating oneself to others, making oneself useful to others, and generally placing the needs, desires, and interests of others above one’s own.

Though they certainly don’t intend to, parents, teachers, and other caretakers offer training in the prioritization of use-value for others by encouraging “good” behavior. This is not always a terrible thing, of course: children are absurdly greedy creatures and resistant in all sorts of ways to the acceptance of basic social (and physical) reality. But some of the ways in which they are resistant — being bored at school, loud at church, constantly escaping into devices — often say more about social reality than about children.

Indeed, given the degree to which our society is unequal, unfair, cruel, and alienating, the adaptation to social reality that is characteristic of adult behavior is typically much more disturbing than stubborn, childish behavior. Adults accept as commonplace the most absurd of realities, and very often this irrationality is a manifestation of the prioritization of use-value for others. Rather than fight back against a given absurdity in the name of what we want, desire, and need, we prioritize—or, more accurately, we are put in positions where we are expected to prioritize—other people’s wants, desires, and needs (our teachers, our bosses, our customers, etc.).

One might suggest that y’all motherfuckers need Satan.

Then there’s this bit from “Imperative of Niceness, Part 24”.

For traditional socialists, solidarity is undergirded most fundamentally by material conditions. You ally with the person next to you because you are experiencing the same shitty conditions at work, you are able to communicate to each other that this experience is shared, and you understand that only by working together can you overcome those shitty conditions. The same basic logic works for decommodifying reforms like universal healthcare or free college: the organizing premise is that the vast majority of people, regardless of their particular ideological commitments (which exist in wildly fractured and idiosyncratic forms), race, gender, or ethnicity, will be attracted to a political program that appeals first and foremost to their material and felt needs rather than their values or cultures.

Left populists, on the other hand, in aiming to build a cross-class coalition, cannot maintain a clear program around material interests. They put fighting transphobia on the same level as fighting for Medicare for All, arguing that people are variously oppressed and marginalized today, that class is not the only determining factor. No doubt many working-class people share left cultural values around justice and intersectionality, but many don’t. And what’s more problematic for building solidarity, in practice the left populist will typically express a preference for a professional-managerial class LGBTQ+ person of color to a working-class white person who is bad at remembering everyone’s preferred pronouns.

The important point here is that oppression (defined in non-class terms) and marginalization do not provide the same kind of conditions of solidarity as do straightforwardly material conditions. You might want to murder the person who sits at the desk next to you when he repeats the worst lines from the worst comedy shows on television, but you also know in an organizing drive that his interests are also yours. Importantly, in this scenario, his material interests are straightforwardly yours: no feat of intersectional calculus need be accomplished during organizing conversations. While solidarity can obviously transcend material interests, material interests are nevertheless the foundation on which the socialist program must be built.

In the absence of this clear basis for organizing, the left populist must find another anchor of solidarity, and this is where affect comes in. The left populist attempts to substitute affect, undergirded by a laundry list of community agreements and invocations to be excited, for material interests. Substituting affect for true solidarity is a necessity given the fragility of the left populist coalition. Everyone needs to be infinitely respectful of everyone else, demonstrate care and compassion and excitement at all times. Absent this active commitment to a constructed, emotional solidarity, the coalition will fall apart.

The problem, beyond the historical ineffectiveness and weakness of the strategy itself, is threefold. First, since affect is used as a substitute for shared material interests, the compulsion to be enthusiastic is infinitely demanding. For left populism, there is no such thing as being too excited. This is the only way in which I can understand the normalization of clinical mania in its ranks.

Second, left populist affect might indeed be “exciting” to many, but it will also be positively alienating to many others, especially certain service industry workers whose working lives are structured by the imperative of niceness, which they are likely looking to escape in their free time.

But finally, and most importantly, this affective imperative is positively hostile to criticism and tension, which are necessities in any truly democratic organization. Criticism is treated as a kind of group invasion, something that must quickly be quelled lest it risk fracturing the entire coalition. This is the real reason why left populism is bound to fail: in needing to generate solidarity ex nihilo, it cannot afford the critical thinking which is desperately needed right now on a left that is trying to rebuild itself.

I know it’s a lot, but this excerpt does an excellent job of crystallizing my misgivings about the sort of people that channers¹ deride as “SJWs”².

They mean well, and giving them the phone number for the local suicide encouragement hotline is almost as cruel as kicking puppies, but when you spend an eight hour day biting your tongue to keep your job the last thing you want is somebody who doesn’t sign your paycheck remonstrating with you because they took offense at something you said without realizing they were in earshot.

They just don’t seem to get that it’s hard enough to get the average working-class American to agree on “eat the rich” because most working-class schmucks still buy that old wheeze about hard work eventually paying off. If you can’t create solidarity with somebody over the fact that work sucks and none of us get paid enough for that shit, do you honestly think you’re going to get somebody to give a shit about how some group that they aren’t part of is oppressed? You think they’re interested in arguing over who’s more oppressed?

I’ve got news for you: anybody who isn’t a billionaire is oppressed, often in at least two or three ways. (Isn’t intersectionality fun?) The one oppression everybody who isn’t rich seems to have in common is that they’ve got to deal with some rich asshole lording it over them.

I’m with the people who think we should fix that first.

But first, I’d like to see what Anselm McGovern did in parts 2-23 of On the Imperative of Niceness because I bet there’s some great shit in there that I haven’t read yet. Unfortunately, Google is fucking useless so I haven’t found those parts yet.