Toward anti-fascisting

[bloodygranuaile]

I decided to kick the 2020s off with Natasha Lennard's recently published Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life. I have been following Lennard's journalism since at least her coverage of the J20 protests, where she only accidentally avoided being arrested herself.

 

Some of the essays in Being Numerous are reprints (usually with short updates appended), meaning I'd read some of them before, although not all of them. Several of the essays are about social movements directly--direct action, state suppression of dissent, anti-fascism, Standing Rock, all that newsy stuff--and these are definitely my favorites. Lennard stays around after most of the other journalists have gone home, chronicling the slow, painful grind of legal wrangling that drags on for months or years after the spectacles of water cannons and garbage cans on fire have dissipated, and with it, the nation's attention. She dives into the philosophical questions of state and non-state violence, what direct action and protest are for, surveillance and visibility, the wrongheadedness of the "good protester/bad protester" dichotomy (a thing that some of my friends also have strong opinions about, and about which I myself am developing stronger opinions by the day), the limitations of (still very important) liberal ideas about individual rights and free speech, and a fairly impressive range of other serious concepts given how short the book is (about 130 pages). She cites a lot of old leftist writers, and a lot of contemporary leftists on Twitter, and all of it is germane.

 

Some of the essays are not about protest but they are still political, even when you wouldn't initially think they would be. One is about a ghost that haunts the bathroom in her parents' house; Lennard uses this as a case study for a philosophical discussion about meaning, truth, objectivity, subjectivity, possibility, and why the New Atheists were so fucking obnoxious. The essay about sex and her terrible ex-boyfriend turns out to be about the use and misuse of the idea that the personal is political, the emptiness of conflating individual lifestyle choice with radical political action, and sexual commodification. (Having met my share of dudes, starting at way too young an age, who tried to argue me into sleeping with them by painting it as part of some grand emancipatory political project, I found this essay to be an especially satisfying takedown of that line of thinking.)

 

Being Numerous can be a little disjointed at time because it goes so many different places in a pretty short space, and I found it worth it to only read one or two essays at a time, then put the book down and go to do something else. Part of this is because otherwise you get mental whiplash jumping between subjects so much, but some of it is also because each essay is thought-provoking enough that I wanted to sit with it a bit before moving along to the next thing. I don't really bother to do that too much anymore, so it really says something about how insightful Lennard's analyses are that I did.