Opinion: The Radical Aesthetic

by R. Akeed

Over the summer, I attended a weekly protest outside of Oregon in support of Palestine. The protests were a culture shock compared to the Portland ICE protests, but they weren’t half bad. They were disruptive, consistent, and upheld ideals of abolition. One day, the organizer asked me why I wasn’t going to wear a keffiyah. I answered that I didn’t have one. They uttered a quiet ‘oh’ and our conversation was over. Out of pure embarrassment of being literally the only person attending that didn’t have anything overtly Pro-Palestinian on my person, I purchased a keffiyah and was immediately drowned in my own shame as I unfolded it in my hands. I had submitted to the very form of trend consumerism that has slaughtered true revolutionary and anarchist sentiment worldwide. What it left was a system in its name that is at best so anti-capitalistic that it has become just as expensive and inaccessible as the bourgeoisie. At worst, its infiltration of capitalism into revolution that has already destroyed any chances of ever escaping our free market democracy. 

While it’s certainly a more noble trend, the trend of the purchase and collection of keffiyahs from Palestinian and non-Palestinian businesses (including industrial ones like Amazon) is not much different than the discourse of Lafufus versus Labubus. Worse, the idea folks have is that they somehow stand on a moral high ground for choosing to “support” Palestinian businesses when really what we should be doing is actively seeking methods to destroy the institutions that are contributing to the genocide. No amount of money thrown in disarray is going to save Palestine. What will save Palestine is an active defunding of the IOF, and then a violent and unwavering desire to break the siege. 

This is relevant now, perhaps more so than it has been in our lifetimes. It is not only related to the genocide: everything is interconnected. It is a mistake to consider global fads, genocide, the brutality of ICE, etc., as separate problems. They aren’t. These issues are all related to the vast and ever-present emphasis on institutional governments and our slow (and yet, steady) realization that we are being over-policed and brutalized by a bureaucracy that yields capitalistic and legal immunities, and those that rent us out, like our employers. It seems quite urgent to consider that these systems which have been placed under our noses; systems that we have accepted, ignored, or even praised until now, are suddenly experiencing harsh criticism and falling apart under an umbrella of systemic abuse. Someone is profiting at the center of each and every tragedy infecting our doomscrolling on Instagram and TikTok.

In any society that is run by the people for the people, any form of immune power (as in authority that is granted any form of immunity or protection beyond those provided to the general public) would be nonexistence. It is only in authoritarian regimes where authority or political superpowers (including those elected into power) is preferred to the sovereignty of the populace. Noam Chomsky poses the question as “are we represented by ‘countrymen like ourselves’ or are we represented by ‘our betters?’” At which point, we can come to the conclusion that we are obviously governed by our betters (or rather those we seem to believe are our betters, who therefore are granted special privileges in our society through certain legal immunities). 

If power is something that comes through money and profit in various avenues, then power itself is a capitalistic hoax; and, if capitalism tries to hide behind a mask of freedom, then we might as well self-diagnose with Stockholm syndrome because we are clearly infatuated by our captors. This is even true for those who believe themselves to be radicals, including myself. The belief that the purchase of arbitrary goods affects what we stand for as individuals is a belief that is clouded by and entrenched in the belief that the amount of money we use or have affects our impact on our society at large, which inherently circles back to the aforementioned capitalistic hoax of power. When property takes precedence over actual actions or even coincides with action, it cannot be called anarchy or socialism but can at best be classified as a distaste for hierarchy that is still infected by other hierarchies. 

Yet what is true is that radicalism and revolution have no prerequisites. 

Adhering to how Chomsky put it, true anarchy or anarcho-syndicalism does not place value based on arbitrary value symbols such as monetary gain, and therefore cannot be interlaced with systems of hierarchy. Any form of consumeristic tendency in revolution is merely a radical aesthetic. True radicalism must also be anarchist by nature— we must always seek to destroy and abolish positions of authority, and therefore abolish tendencies in the revolutionary spectacle that have capitalistic undertones. 

There is a tendency, I think, in both the media and education, to not fully understand the revolutionist lifestyle and revolutionary procedure. This is to uphold order. Pacifism is a romanticized idea, and yet there is a tendency to deny or justify the violence that comes from the betters, versus violence that comes from those who are viewed as not being part of the betters. 

You cannot restrict a person’s freedom, over-police them in every regard, and then blame them for any sort of uprising, whether it's pacifist or violent. To do so would be to imply that somehow the lives of those who are either occupied or under a certain regime are less important than the occupation or the regime.

To truly change anything we must first admit the things we fail to acknowledge—that we are each very susceptible to the current inertia of society. Then, we must actively go against it. We must be willing to wreak havoc, not only on the systems that are in place, but also on ourselves and our lives and question the very fabric of our being in these systems and institutions, including the very decision we made to come to Reed College, and continue our academic careers here. We cannot be afraid to push the boundaries of questioning. If we are, we are again upholding this capitalist hierarchy. 

In his essay The Society of The Spectacle, Guy Debord criticizes anarchists, saying that they always hold the belief that “revolution is right around the corner”. I would agree very strongly with this critique. Revolution is oftentimes treated as if it is some errand or task that keeps being pushed off to the next day. 

Perhaps it is overthought, or revolution is treated as something far away. Revolution is maybe a weekend activity, or a year of our lives we must give away. But what if it wasn’t? What if revolution was as easy as identifying something that one completely opposes—and then going against every part of it?