Who I am, who I’ve become, and why I refuse self-affiliation.

It’s no coincidence I began this project not a week after my trip to Jena, Louisiana, although the issues I want to address are hardly new; I’ve been turning these ideas over in my head for as long as I’ve been anything more than a face in the crowd. But Jena laid it all out in front of me, opened my eyes to who I was, and showed me what I did and did not want to become. See, I’m a radical activist. I’ve been so for about a year and a half now. Not to say I haven’t been somewhat involved in anti-war and social justice movements of the UfPJ variety… and nothing personal against UfPJ, I do think they have done some good work, if moderate reforms are what you’re looking for. And I can’t imagine them reciprocating my acknowledgment of their worth, but that’s another problem. But back to mine. You see, as long as I’ve been involved on an organizer’s level, I’ve been searching for a political or ideological affiliation to call my own. Every radical has one, it seems, even if it means compromising their true beliefs to fit into a convenient little package. Even anarchism (something I am definitely not, more on that later) fits into its own package of beliefs, methods, and ideals. I’ve tried it all… after being turned off to the International Socialist Organization very early on, I did the anarchy-artist thing. After I saw the need for unity instead of individual acts of activism, I joined the World Can’t Wait, of which I am still an organizer in my community and college campus. Working with WCW, of course, introduced me to the Revolutionary Communist Party, which many of WCW’s initiators and organizers are supporters of. But no, Maoism is definitely not for me (more on that later as well), and the mere mention of Bob Avakian’s name often makes me gag, not because I don’t think he is a very influential and impressive thinker, but because of the way the RCP continually parades him around as their “leader” while developing no ideas outside of his dictation (yes, I’ll elaborate on that more later).

Then I realized just how many Marxist groups there really were: Workers World Party, Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of America, International Socialist Organization… the list goes on and on and on and on. So many groups, so much separatism, so many versions of Marxism and none thought the others to be worth shit. Then I realized, shouldn’t there be as many schools of Marxist thought as there are Marxists? Wouldn’t the seperatism and lack of unity within leftist groups disappear if everyone brought their own critiques of socialist ideals to a very united table instead of gating off Marxist thought into very sectarian, very isolated ideological groups? The same goes for anarchists, though by their very nature they don’t have very many organized factions in their ranks.

And I know I am not alone here. This is not a “reformist” or “reactionary” point of view… I know many radicals who feel this way, but we haven’t a clue how to go about addressing it. Many partyist radicals think of us as the too-moderate, Moveon.org types who just want everyone to hold hands and get along, not addressing our differences or seek any sort of resolve for them. And there are many individuals who do think that way, but that’s not the way I or my fellow lost radicals see it. Addressing differences is, in fact, something that is very much being held back from the radical Left’s movement… but it’s mainly coming from partyists, not anti-partyists. If it was anti-partyist radicals and not, say, the RCP, WWP, etc who want to unite across idealogical lines to form stronger alliances, the RCP, WWP, ISO, SWP, etc would actually speak to one another as equals, but they just don’t.  I’ve seen it in action, especially at massive anti-war demonstrations. It seems each Marxist group has its own newspaper (most say the exact same thing), and they will shit-talk any other group’s literature to get theirs out. They don’t even talk to one another. Not even a nod or a civil hello… so I can’t even begin to imagine these people getting together for coffee and discussing a way to find truth and strength in each other’s ideologies. Don’t even BOTHER trying to get anarchists and Marxists into a civil debate. And that is what’s perhaps what’s killing the Left now more than ever.

So back to Jena. I went down with some friends; they were both supporters of the RCP. We met some other RCP supporters in Atlanta and away we went. I was there to show my support for the Jena 6, to declare myself as a human being against racism, and probably also to witness history in the making. My RCP comrades, it seemed, were there to sell papers. I have no problem with this, really. But it’s not what I do at a demonstration, and it *is* what RCP supporters do, almost in monastic unison. Unquestioning. Relentless. Separatist. And amongst other Marxist-identifying groups doing the exact same thing. It was then, just last week, I could finally realize that in my search for a radical group I could call home, what I really wanted was to be a radical that had no home at all. To be free to either march, get out literature, have conversations, chant, riot, etc… without the baggage associated with what group I was with or the worry of not doing what the group was “supposed to be doing”.  So I made the decision to be a nomad, a radical refusing self-affiliation. It was very liberating. And listening to Bob Avakian talks on CD all the way home, picking out things I liked and disliked about what he was saying and having the mind to critique it all, I knew I’d made the right decision. Oh, how my comrades would scoff, how they would pick me apart and call me a reformist and attempt to destroy the peace of mind I was just beginning to explore. It didn’t matter… I was home.

So who am I, anyway? I am choosing to keep my true identity undisclosed, not because I fear retribution from self-affiliated activists I may be close to, hell no. I’m not afraid to have this discussion, and I try to do it often. My purpose here is to create a voice for radicals of all pseudo- or non-affiliations, not tell my stories or spit my personal ideology onto a blog. We’ve got enough of that already, and identity politics are definitely not what I’m looking to do (more on that later). I want to speak to other self-sure but not self-affiliated radicals that sense a problem in the movement they cannot quite identify… something to finally unite with on a more holistic level. My true name would have too much identity attached to it.  You could enter my name into Google and come across things that would make you not be able to relate to me at all.  It is for that reason I will use my alias, E.G. Smith. This alias was first used by Emma Goldman after the shooting and eventual death of President McKinley. She used it when she was deemed a threat to the system, unemployable and under attack from every which way for her ideals she had bravely come to embody. So now I use it, a threat to the systems of both capitalism and radical leaderism, under attack from every which way for my ideals I have, through much struggle, come to embody.

And so off we go into the depths of the struggle,
E.G. Smith