Deep Green Resistance - Liberal vs Radical Part 1 of 3

What are the differences and which one are you?

Two of my favorite people from history.

My dad gets upset because they don't really
teach science anymore in the public schools,

and this is mostly because the Right Wing
can't bear the thought of evolution.

My mom gets sad 'cause they don't
really teach history anymore

and my sister fairly weeps because you don't
get art anymore in the school system.

But me, I'm like, “they just don't teach
revolution anymore in those public schools.”

[audience laughs] Am I right?
Right?

So this is like the basic political education that really,
we all should have gotten, and really most of us didn't.

And I start here with liberals and radicals
because I think this is the main division.

I think this is important because a lot of times in our
friendships and our activist networks and even in our groups,

and across broader movements, there are these
tensions that can be really painful and profound

and a lot of it really comes down to the
difference between liberals and radicals.

I, in the end, don't care which
side of this you decide to land on

you got to figure out which, you know, which world
view actually describes the world as you know it

(and that's up to you really).

But it can really help to understand where these different perspectives are
coming from because then when you have these conflicts suddenly you go,

“right, that's liberal and I'm radical, and that's why we're never going to
meet in the middle” because these are profound differences, politically.

Doesn't mean we can't work together;
lots of coalitions need to happen.

I mean, I am not trying to demonize anybody here but these ARE
different positions that people can take across the spectrum.

I would say the main division between
liberals and radicals is individualism.

Liberals believe that society is made up of individuals.
That's the basic social unit.

In fact individualism is so sacrosanct that in this view, to be identified
as a member of a group is seen as an affront; that's the insult.

Totally different for radicals over
on the other side of the chart.

Society is not made up of individual
people, it's made up of groups of people.

In Marx's original version this was class, it was economic class. This is the debt
that all radicals owe Karl Marx. It doesn't matter if you are a Marxist or not,

HE figured this out. It's groups of people and some groups
have power over other groups. That's what society is made of.

In the radicals' understanding being a member of a group is not an insult.
In fact it's the first primary step you have to take

coming to a radical consciousness and then ultimately having effective
political action, you have to identify as a member of that group.

You've got to make common cause with the people who share
your condition. That's how political change happens.

This is both an active and a critical
embrace of that group identity

We radicals get accused all the time of creating this kind
of “victim identity”, but that's not what's going on.

We are more than what they've done
to us, and we do have agency.

But we do have to recognize that there is power
in the world and we're on the receiving end.

The other big division is between the nature of social reality.
Liberalism is what's called “idealist”.

Social reality, for them, is made up of
attitudes, of ideas; it's a mental event.

And therefore social change happens through education.
Through changing people's minds.

Materialism, in contrast, over on the radical side: society is organized by
concrete systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas. By material institutions.

And the solution to oppression is to
take those systems apart brick by brick.

The liberals will say, “we have to educate, educate, educate”,
and the radicals will say, “actually we have to stop them”.

Political movements need education, this
is an educational event, here we are.

And you need active proselytizing, the oppressed need mechanisms
to understand political oppression, consciousness raising.

This is all really profoundly important.

But for radicals alone that does not change social reality. Because
the world is not an internal state. It's not a mental state.

The point of education is to build the movement that can take down
those oppressive structures and bring about some kind of justice.

If you remove power from the equation
oppression looks either natural or voluntary.

If you're not going to see that people are formed by these social
conditions how else are you going to explain subordination?

Well either those people aren't quite human, so they're
naturally different than us -- that's why they're subordinate,

or they're somehow volunteering to be subordinate.
Those are the options that you're left with.

For instance race and gender are seen as biological. These are supposed
to be physically real. Well they're not, they're politically real.

It's brutal, vicious subordination that creates those things. But it's
ideology, and it is the ideology of the powerful that says this is biological.

They make that claim that this is biological because how are you going
to fight God or Nature or 4 million years of evolution? Well you're not.

There are physical differences between people who are from northern Europe and people
who live at the equator, just like there are differences between males and females

but those differences only matter because power needs them to. It is power
that creates the ideology and it's a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power.

These are unjust systems that we are going to have to dismantle,
and these are social categories we are going to have to destroy.

Just like naturalism operates in the
service of power, so does volunteerism.

If you are not going to go the biological route,
all you are left with is volunteerism as a concept.

This is the thing that liberals do not understand. With power removed from the equation,
if it looks voluntary you are going to erase the fact that it's social subordination.

So here is Florynce Kennedy, “without
the consent of the oppressed.”

90% of any oppression is consensual. That's what it does. It does
not mean it's our fault, it does not mean we are responsible,

it doesn't mean it will somehow
crumble if we withdraw our consent.

All it means is that the powerful—the capitalists, the white supremacists, the
masculinists, whoever—they can't stand over vast numbers of people 24/7 with guns.

Luckily, for them, depressingly for
the rest of us, they don't have to.