The Personal Isn’t Always Political
'The personal is political' originated as a crucial feminist insight into the politics of daily life – but in recent years, the slogan has morphed into an excuse for reducing politics to the individual and the moral.
You reactionary, are you still saying ‘people of colour’ rather than BiPOC? Watch your language, which is literally violence. However the worst thing you can do to the planet is have a baby. Actually, it may be even worse to serve up a big holiday turkey, especially if you then posted a photo on the internet; this is called ‘meatposting’, and it’s apparently even worse than eating and enjoying meat, because when you Instagram the experience, you’re perpetuating the idea that eating meat is cool, despite its deleterious environmental effects.
Judging and being judged gets exhausting. Are you tired yet? Perhaps you think of sports and entertainment as an escape from the stressful realm of politics. Wrong again. You must stan only teams and celebrities with the correct political opinions who are also taking the correct individual actions. That would definitely not, for example, include Kyrie Irving, the NBA star who has made headline for rejecting a Covid vaccine, or Tyson Fury, the world heavyweight champion blighted by a history of homophobic comments.
You’re probably getting the message that no matter how personal or inconsequential it might seem, everything you do and say is political these days. This emphasis on the politics of the minute is burdensome to most of us, who are just out here trying to get through our day. But more to the point, though none of us is perfect, we’re probably not the right targets of our collective ire. Beating up ourselves and others for individual transgressions is a distraction from the people who are really causing the world’s problems: the ruling class.
Even worse, this hyper-fixation on the political implications of each individual action blinds us to our collective potential. Indeed, a US study by a Wellesley College political scientist found that white Americans with the highest levels of concern about racial injustice and inequality ranked ‘listening to people of colour’ and ‘educating myself about racism’ as more important than ‘bringing racial issues to the attention of elected officials’ or voting. Nowadays it’s pretty clear that we are taking our politics too personally.
Radical Origins
But it’s worth remembering that the idea that the ‘personal is political’ started off as brilliant insight. During the second-wave feminist movement of the late sixties and early seventies, women gathered in ‘consciousness-raising’ groups to talk about their lives. Discussions of bad sex, housework, or unwanted pregnancy helped women to understand their collective lack of power, leading them to take action and organise for societal change.
The Redstockings women’s liberation group founder Kathie Sarachild wrote that these early consciousness-raising sessions led to women ‘doing something politically about aspects of our lives as women that we never thought could be dealt with politically, that we just thought we would have to work out as best we could alone.’ Many of Britain’s advances in the late 1960s can be traced to such ‘consciousness-raising’, from the Abortion Rights Act of 1967 to the women machinists strike in Dagenham the following year, and so too could some of the period’s classic feminist books, like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, both published in 1970.
The insight that the personal was political informed the whole feminist movement, from Jane O’Reilly’s essay in Ms. Magazine, ‘Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth’ to the campaign for the Equal Pay Act to women organising against rape. In the context of second wave feminism, ‘the personal is political’ meant that those problems that women felt they were suffering alone, whether unequal pay or lack of access to male-dominated fields (from medicine to construction), or domestic violence, were not individual failings but problems with a patriarchal system, problems that demanded collective action.
Of course, given the individualistic ethos of consumer society, the concept began to devolve quickly. The structure and insight of the consciousness-raising group was rapidly appropriated by hippy gurus in ‘encounter groups’, as the middle classes understandably sought to free themselves from the alienation of bourgeois society, but sought to do so mainly by attempting to reject aspects of it on their own, rather than working to build new economic and social arrangements. The forms and ideas of consciousness-raising were also absorbed by Madison Avenue, which deployed focus groups to reach similar insights about women, not for organising, of course, but to sell products to them.
The Morass of Moralism
Today, the idea that the personal is political has devolved still further. As a culture, instead of believing that our individual experiences, shared by others, can form the basis for collective action, we now believe the political is personal, a neoliberal perversion of an idea that was designed to be collective. As an idea, ‘the personal is political’ helped women to understand that an abusive boyfriend or a sex-pest boss was neither their fault, nor their problem to bear alone, but rather, a political problem with political solutions. But the notion that the political is personal does the reverse. It takes our political impulse, our desire to analyse the world in political terms and change it, and turns it inward.
In a world where the political is personal it becomes important to perform your essential political goodness. Put a ‘In this House we Believe’ sign on your lawn. If you live in a settler-colonialist country like Canada or the United States, begin that corporate board meeting by ‘thanking’ the indigenous people from whom the land was stolen. That may sound harmless, but the corollary to all of this individual goodness is the hunt for badness. When the political is personal, we then must work to identify those individuals who embody everything that is politically bad, perhaps someone who has made a ‘bad tweet’. The spectacle of pile-ons is almost daily in left-wing circles, despite a widespread acknowledgement that they do little to advance our politics.
All this is seen as justified because, as Natalie Wynn has observed on her YouTube show, Contrapoints, it’s not only the action or offence that’s bad and must be cancelled: it’s you as a person. While some strains of Christianity urge us to ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’, adherents of ‘the political is personal’ take a more Protestant view: you’re predestined to be good or bad, and your actions merely demonstrate whether or not you’re part of the natural elect. On social media, the elect enjoy rewards, in the form of likes, for condemnations of the bad, and the bad are punished, in the form of quote tweets, for observations or remarks that show how bad they are. Every belief system has its rituals, and these are the rituals that nourish the ‘political is personal’ worldview.
The moralistic drift of this type of politics is deeply anti-collective and anti-majoritarian, since goodness is highly individual. One might even look at it as a competitive ‘positional good’, a term that in economics lingo refers to a thing that has value because it is rare, as the title of Catherine Liu’s book on the politics of the professional-managerial class, Virtue Hoarders suggests. Like toilet paper in a pandemic, individual goodness in this climate is difficult to come by and won’t last long.
The Political Is Political
Encouragingly, however, the old, collective consciousness-raising spirit of ‘the personal is political’ is still alive. The strategy still informs important movement books; Jenny Brown, a long-time activist in both groups, drew extensively upon consciousness raising sessions in her book Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, which explores the material reasons why so many women are choosing to have fewer children (or none at all). Such choices are seen as deeply private, yet the women in the consciousness-raising groups found that they were not alone in feeling that the economic and practical obstacles to happy child-rearing were immense, and were then able to reinterpret a personal struggle as a systemic problem within capitalism, one with solutions that might be reached through collective struggle.
Similarly, the mass socialist electoral campaigns of recent years helped many to understand — and confront — structural factors behind their individual problems. When now-congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was, in her words, ‘a sexually harassed waitress’ who did not make a living wage or have healthcare, she has said she didn’t believe that she deserved those things. She had internalised the ideology of neoliberalism: if you’re poor, it’s because of some individual failing on your part. You simply haven’t succeeded. Bernie Sanders, she says, by demanding a different kind of world, made her understand that she was a human being, who deserved a comfortable life, that the struggles she faced were not due to her personal failings, but to those of the system she now fights to transform.
The best political leaders in the socialist movement right now are those who, like Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, help people connect their personal experiences to a political movement and a political solution; in fact, it’s a good definition of political organising as any. Tenant organisers talk to renters about their landlords and help them move from the powerless feeling that they have to settle for a leaky ceiling to the realisation that everyone else in the building has similar complaints; that’s how rent strikes — and any collective actions — happen, and that’s how people fight the ruling class and win. It is the only way. The personal is still political, and the insight still moves and politicises us.
But that does not mean that your preference for one Marvel comics movie over another is political, nor that (with a handful of exceptions) cancelling individual people is political work. It’s only as part of a movement that we ever make any political change. As climate activist Bill McKibben once told me, ‘People are always asking: What can I do as an individual to save the planet? I always say, the best thing you can do is be less of an individual.’