academia is lonely

I am reading and reading and reading about mobilizations and lost times and communalism and here I am, all alone. I could have gone up the street and read with my friend Matt, but I didn't. I'm too sad. He's wonderful but I don't know him that well and I'm feeling really porous right now.

I'm finishing off the red wine that honors the 120 patriots who helped lead Chile to independence and wondering about the state and thinking, we want to figure out ways to organize ourselves outside the purview of the neoliberal nation-state and most people can't decide that a Wal-Mart is a bad thing to have in one's neighborhood. It makes me so sad.

Murray Bookchin, who I am reading now, is really sad about the single-issue activism that pervades leftist movements. Funny thing is, I would say that any other kind of organizing has made itself apparent to me outside of the last, well, couple of years or so. I never thought to think big to think that capitalism itself can be organized against. I guess summit protests were that kind of thinking big. I knew about it I guess, but it just seemed like such bygone era. And to some extent it is. But I'm so hopeful and disappointed at the same time.

Mostly I'm disappointed in myself. Like, I don't try hard enough. Nothing feels like enough. And maybe it shouldn't ever and that's precisely why the work continues. Radical and revolutionary social movement building, to me, seems so mired in ideology or guilt or meanness. I shouldn't say this. But I can't stop thinking about how movement building works and what kinds of methods folks want to employ to win folks over. What does it take not only to attract people but to KEEP them?

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. If my students are any indication of the work that is to be done, it is first and foremost - oh, I don't know. Teaching them how to think or hold onto a thought for more than a minute? To act on those thoughts? To care in the first place? To be interested in being educated rather than perpetually entertained? I really don't fucking know.

Bookchin is so fucking obsessed with reason as the way forward. I don't totally agree with him. Something else drives revolutionary fervor and a sense of possibility. Katsiaficas calls it 'the eros effect.' I get it and I think there's something to it. But something more needs to actually keep people fighting and that's where I think Bookchin is useful. He wants to think through how do we actually take it a step further in those moments of eros? Richard Day thinks that the 'logic of affinity' means that the distinction between revolution and reform is no longer necessary. I don't agree with that either. I think there is a difference between actions that reform (or retreat) from the existing structure and those that can inform fundamental change. What is it? Is capitalism just so pervasive, so omnipresent in our material, psychological, and social lives that it's just impossible to think and act outside of it for more than a 'temporary autonomous' moment?