big beef and beyond
cancel me twice, shame on you
If we have any hope of remaking this world on fire, we need to act differently from the arsonists: militant discernment of what we build and what we burn.
Too often the desire for “safer spaces” comes with a demand for purity: perfect behaviour, perfect politics, ignoring the reality of our deeply messy human relationships in favour of a shrill vanguardism, appeals to a certain dourness, an affect of already eagerly awaiting betrayal in first-stone-casting olympics, usually accompanied by an addiction to underplaying one’s own inherent dignity. is it harm or do you just need your pussy ate, indeed.
There has never been a more urgent need to build coalitions with people who might not yet agree with us on everything, and yet clutching at endlessly expanding lists of “isms” and “phobias” then punishing and disposing of the people who are already demonstrably on your side is still a hallmark of being politically active in many corners. What lies on the other side of that?
Big Beef and Beyond is a popular education programme I first started dreaming up during the pandemic to explore some these questions.
My guest on this month’s radio show, which is all about conflict cultures through the lens of our work in Big Beef and Beyond, is fellow Refuge Worldwide resident Sarj. Sarj is true master facilitator, lord of the quiet work of holding intense contradictions while insisting on our right to be who we are in all our faults especially when things get hairy. I have been working with them on this since they came to an early session I ran and now I have performed an entrapment to get them to be my homie.
On this show, which previews some of the material we cook in the Beef kitchen, Sarj and I get into: Wait, what is ideology? Why can the politics of identity be so corrosive to solidarity movements? What if not everything is an emergency? Why do we so love to create more ‘available enemies’ inside our groups or social worlds? Is it, perchance, to access a little righteous power as a treat while we distract from our shameful feelings of totalising powerlessness against the daily telephone barrage of actual existing genocidal evil? Are you in an organising group or a Model UN? We also play punk music.
We discuss the endless torment of overstated harm, what has changed since people tried to picket feminist bookstores during the Conflict is not Abuse book tour in 2014, where this impulse comes from, how to address it without tipping into cynicism, cruelty or reactionary edgelord stuff (fr fr, RIP to the ones we lost along the way!) Why allergy to leadership can be bad, actually, and what I call the “Big System Little System” Mix Up: or why degrees of oppression under massive global structures might not be the right lens through which to look at every single drama in your five person activist group! We hear from my dear old friend, former bandmate and housemate Sam who nwo works at a drop-in for homeless people in Melbourne about de-escalation when the stakes are high, and Katie, another day one who moved from a big city to a small English seaside town currently being targeted heavily by the far-right and has interesting things to say about that experience and its impact on her politics, the inefficacy of shame, and the need to hold your nose and welcome liberals for a diversity of tactics against actual fascist street marches.
This radio show, and the Big Beef and Beyond project itself, is a synthesis of a lot of wild and heartbreaking experiences, gigantic lessons, quiet magic and so on, and is in itself a strange sort of tribute to every project that collapsed for some totally avoidable reason. It’s also def a love listenletter to Sarj who is one of two people who make this strange city with its quality of always approaching total darkness feel light and possible! For now, the latest iteration of Big Beef and Beyond is part of 90Mil Art School, starting Tuesday March 31 across four Tuesday evening sessions and if you are in Berlin or know someone who might like this, come by and pay what you can. Do it!
If you’re a lil piqued by all this but not here physically, you can always hit the subscribe here and we’ll let you know when there is something online to join.
End notes:
Just like Sarj, I’ve been at this type of thing for decades somehow, learning the most through being called to help out when shit was kicking off due to some crisis or other, long before I had any idea what I was doing. That floppy hosepipe rage response exposes itself as useless after a few years in the game. It has never been truer that we don’t need more outrage, we need more direction. This is an easy trap. In my time I’ve posted some egregiously embarassing dirty laundry on our 2010 Facebook status updates instead of seeking someone out for a direct conversation, and so have you! We live and learn. I know a decent amount I suppose about what works and doesn’t when things fall apart in groups. Pain is real, deep so often multipolar. I’ve been trying slowly to think through what a Marxist feminist approach to this stuff is, reaching back with a grimace of recognition to exasperated womancestor Jo Freedman through seminal texts Trashing and The Tyranny of Structurelessness, how they sit alongside what LeftRoots National Secretary Ntanya Lee called ‘principled struggle.’
Doing what we can to try and normalise practices of muddling through and not abandoning each other when things are tough without the alienating woo-woo abstractions, rejecting both grifter claims to having easy answers and essentialising claims to inherent correctness (what the Germans call ‘Deutungsoheit’)… it seems like as good a use of time as any. Berlin, dear Berlin, especially, can be a cursed epicentre for some of these tendencies, to a level that when I began to engage in political work here made me feel like I was having a full blown flashback to the discourse of ten years prior everywhere else I had been. Time is a flat circle and so on. I have not quite yet diagnosed why this city is so specifically bad for this, although I do have my theories about what it means to form part of a sort of floating fatberg of terminal newcomers desperately hungry for a replacement family yet lost in the soup of fungible identity categories, shut out of basic stability, always already about to leave for the season, where everyone is everyone else landlord three to five times a year, etc, but more on that another day)
I want to credit the name which I came up with after my buddy Rosemary told me that the comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement run a session for new joiners called ‘Is it Beef?’ to help instill a culture of ascertaining whether something is a political or a personal conflict, and to act accordingly.
the ‘Beyond’ is there because of course, after twenty years in the game thinking alongside the raw power (bad kind) of gender-based violence both at my job and in seemingly every other rivulet i found myelf, I know there is no future in simply dismissing these very real ways we fuck each other up, even less in leaving what should happen when it happens to the literal state. good god. my belief in people (not our goodness, not our capacity for evil, just our peopleness) is the closest thing i have to a religion. good god. we’ve had plenty long enough to start imagining (and indeed d o i n g) otherwise. i’ve tasted enough of the tiny miracles to be found in refusing to turn away from people to tell you it is worth it.
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Tunes on show:
