> Neither the “modern activist left” nor the “alt-right” are political movements, they’re more like religious movements centred on a new mode of identity. Their “political” project is merely that their identities be respected.
While all political and other ideological movements share a certain degree of the character of religious movements, the idea that either for the “modern activist left” or the “alt-right” the political program is “merely” respect for identities is…buying in way to much to some of the superficial language used in each movement, and paying far too little attention ot the details of what each means by respecting their identities.
> This isn’t politics: there is no material, economic, or institutional goal.
It is politics, and the goals are absolutely an intertwined combination of material, economic, and institutional objectives.
For the “modern activist left” we can narrow that to, say, The Movement for Black Lives, one of the (but not the only) organizational and agenda-setting organizations of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and look at its concrete policy agenda, digging into the subcomponents of the 2020 platform [0]:
* Divest from surveillance, policing, mass criminalization, incarceration and deportation.
* Invest in making communities stronger and safer through quality, affordable housing, living wage employment, public transportation, education, and health care that includes voluntary, harm reduction and patient-driven, community-based mental health and substance abuse treatment.
* Invest in community-based transformative violence prevention and intervention strategies, that offer support for criminalized populations
* Uncouple access to services, care, and support from the criminal punishment system.
* Provide reparations to survivors of police violence and their families, and to survivors of prison, detention and deportation violence, and their families.
* Decriminalize youth under 23.
* Remove police and surveillance from schools.
* Direct resources toward violence prevention and transformative responses that create a nurturing and positive school climate for all students and create opportunities for youth to thrive in community.
* Interrupt and end criminalization and deportation of Black women. Develop and support non-criminalizing and non-coercive, voluntary, accessible, harm reduction-based and trauma-informed responses to unmet mental health needs, drug use, involvement in the sex trades, survival theft, and community and interpersonal violence. These responses must prioritize, promote, and protect the safety, agency, and self-determination of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
* Ensure that Black women have access to resources that will enable them to escape and avoid interpersonal and community violence, including living wage employment; quality, accessible, and affordable housing; immigration status; universal, quality, and accessible health care; comprehensive, culturally appropriate community-based mental health care; universal, quality, and accessible childcare; and healthy environments.
* Ensure full access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care and eliminate discriminatory barriers to health care for all people.
* Eliminate the foster system’s power to permanently and irreversibly destroy Black families through termination of parental rights.
* End profiling, criminalization, police, and prison violence against Black trans and gender nonconforming people.
* Ensure access to safe and equitable, affirming, accessible, quality housing, employment, healthcare, social services, and education for trans, queer, and gender nonconforming people. This includes reducing unemployment and workplace discrimination; providing real, meaningful, and equitable universal health care; and full and equitable access to services, including counseling, community centers, and shelters.
* Affirm gender self-determination in all aspects of life from birth, and ensure freedom from non-consensual medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants and children.
* Our entire health care system must be reorganized to ensure the physical, mental, and spiritual health, well-being, self-determination, agency, and autonomy of Black people, to eliminate profiteering insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical equipment industries, and to create conditions that will allow healing of our bodies, minds and spirits, and of the generational trauma which contributes to the war on Black health.
* Elimination of restrictions on entry to the United States that disproportionately target and exclude Black migrants.
* An immediate end to all detention, deportations, Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids, roving Border Patrols, and private and public immigration detentions centers.
* Repeal of the 1996 crime and immigration bills.
* Divestment from immigration enforcement institutions, corporations and border militarization apparatus, including Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
* Mandatory, free, and accessible legal representation for migrants in immigration court, including language interpretation and disability accommodations.
* End the criminalization, surveillance, structural exclusion, demonization and deportation of Black migrants, particularly migrants who are undocumented, Muslim, trans, nonbinary, LGBQ+, disabled, people in the sex trade, people living with HIV, people who have criminal convictions, asylum seekers, refugees, low and no-income people, youth, DACA-mented and under-documented people.
* A moratorium on all prison, jail, immigrant and youth detention construction, without an accompanying expansion of home arrest or GPS monitoring or other forms of e-carceration.
* Decommission all prisons, jails, and immigration and youth detention centers not currently imprisoning people, followed by demolition or repurposing for non-punitive purposes.
* Retroactive elimination of sentences of life without parole (LWOP) and sentences that will result in death by incarceration.
* Immediate release of all elders, people in comas, on life support, or in end of life care in prisons and jails.
* Immediate release of all political prisoners, and an end to the use of incarceration and solitary confinement as a tool of political repression..
* An end to all jails, prisons, immigration and youth detention, and civil commitment facilities.
* Abolish the death penalty, life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), and death by incarceration..
* Immediately and retroactively decriminalize drug and prostitution-related offenses and invest savings into programs and services identified by people in the drug and sex trades, and implement a full and comprehensive reparations package for people, families, and communities harmed by the drug war and criminalization of prostitution.
* An end to the long-standing monitoring and criminalization of Black people.
* Diversion of public funds used for surveillance to meeting community needs.
* Elimination of gang databases and related information sharing, and provisions giving individuals placed on gang databases with notice and an opportunity to seek removal.
* Elimination of surveillance of targeted communities, including people accessing public benefits, hospitals, and services, disabled people, people in the sex trades, people seeking and providing information about self-managed abortion, political activists, Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian people and communities, and people on probation or parole.
* End money bail and pretrial detention
* Eliminate risk assessments
* Eliminate criminal punishment fees and fines
* an immediate ban on the use of military equipment by law enforcement and Border Patrol in all circumstances
* an immediate end to the transfer of military equipment to federal, state, and local police, and campus law enforcement agencies, and an immediate end to the use of military equipment by any law enforcement agency, including Customs and Border Patrol.
* immediate disclosure of all military equipment transferred and acquired and its intended use by federal, state, and local governments.
* Eliminate restrictions and exclusions on access to housing, education, employment, social programs and benefits, voting rights, parental rights, and other civil rights based on prior criminal convictions.
There is a lot one could say about this, but among the things one could not honestly say is that it is not material, not economic, not institutional, or not in every respect political in the normal sense of the word.
And if you dig into the demands by other groups that would tpyically be viewed as part of the “activist left” you’ll find the same level of material, economic, and institutional objectives, though the details and focus will differ. And the same, though often diametrically opposed, for groups within the “alt-right” umbrella.
[0] https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/