Exiled in the Margins
In the face of mounting global fascism, being exiled from society is a well of crushing demoralization. This lethal normalcy is formed by an ongoing pandemic as well as concurrent genocides at home and abroad. Through capitulation to and apologism for fascist violence, the entire political spectrum appears to be spilling into the right. Most americans are all but too willing to discard any notion of collective agency that would shift our current trajectory away from the destructive path we find ourselves hurtling down. Discourses and rhetoric that once seemed genuine and well-intentioned have now been exposed as hollow performances meant to justify electoralist acts of negligence and tolerance of reactionary violence.
Those of us who want to get free but have been thoroughly exiled from society understand how passionately a white supremacist world wants us to disappear. Eugenicist normalcy sees us as walking gravestones en route to already forgotten cemeteries. Wherever we speak against the lies and falsehoods people swaddle themselves in we are ridiculed and pushed further into isolation. We are exiled because we would rob liberals of the self-importance they feel entitled to simply for choosing the “better” fascist at the ballot box. We are ostracized for having no capacity to spare for actions and demonstrations that endanger our lives. Left to fend for ourselves as the fascist tide reaches up to our necks, our efforts to merely survive are denigrated as something unimportant and outside “the work” that’s supposedly freeing us.
As access to care becomes more scarce and marginalized people are further criminalized, people continue to go through electoralist motions unaware of or simply uninterested in knowing how demonstrably wasteful and fruitless these capitalist campaigns are. Unprecedented availability of information detailing just how much widespread suffering imperialism causes elicits, at best, only dispassionate rationalizations of the electoral system. At worst we are told it is selfish to insist on putting an end to genocide when we “should be” contributing to the system that lists genocide among the state’s many “rights.”
At every scale of human interaction we find fascism hard at work. Abusers can far more reliably find support and defense than survivors. The covid denialism today’s normalcy is built upon owes much of its efficacy to years of convoluted justifications of abuse apologism. By supplying radicals, progressives, and reactionaries alike with the means to portray tolerance of abuse as something morally righteous, fascism gained an arsenal of language and tactics that works at every scale, from individual relationships to massive institutions. Now all of society can gaslight those aware of the damage covid inflicts, making them that much more likely to become medically incarcerated for protecting their health as they struggle to access healthcare. Every covid denialist can help assuage the discomfort of mass cognitive dissonance as they look around and see little to no masks in their daily lives.
The fascistic nature of capitalism can reliably depend upon people living in the imperial core to defend it from liberatory efforts that would otherwise imperil it. Given the danger of this deteriorating cultural landscape and the growing frequency of climate catastrophes, collective preparation for increased precarity is more than appropriate. Despite our being exiled by a ubiquity of squandered opportunities to develop care networks in recent years, the need to sustainably provide care for each other remains. In anticipation of the next flashpoint in struggle and worsening precarity, it is also important that we ready ourselves to thwart new attempts to exploit the vulnerable.
Fascism is popularly interpreted to mean that the state and fringe conservative groups are inflicting especially reactionary violence on marginalized people. This does describe an aspect of the fascism we face today. However, under eugenicist normalcy especially, we must also grapple with the reality that reactionary violence may come from our loved ones and people we consider to be our comrades in liberatory struggle. We may understand that abusive relationships are made possible through coercion, but do we understand that groups can sometimes operate by the same means?
As more people struggle to survive precarity, they will look more intensely for answers to their suffering. Mass death and disablement have become more enshrined within everyday life and this dynamic depends upon constant cultural and material maintenance from americans. During this moment when so many of us are being left behind or have long since been abandoned, it is important that we name what’s happening and discuss trends many would rather leave unacknowledged. If we wish to see the end of fascism in our lifetimes, we must learn to identify this proliferation of ways to inflict harm and cause exile.
Throughout this zine I mean to offer a collection of patterns I’ve observed personally as well as the observations from those I care about and struggle alongside. I’ve been exiled for being a Black transfemme, neurodivergent, a survivor, for wearing a mask, for criticizing leaders, for helping expose abusers, and for taking political stances that are not considered respectable by more widely recognized political tendencies.
There is value in sharing information that may assist those who have found themselves exiled and unable to access collective care and resources in public life. This piece is an attempt to help those who’ve been pushed to disregard their needs and have been preyed upon within spaces and networks they once trusted or considered themselves loyal to. This is for those who are struggling to build safety, survive, and end fascism for good.
Cults, Covid, and Coercion
Instead of being a concept we problematize as seriously as we do when discussing vanguard parties, affinity groups, spokescouncils, or coalitions, we allow the word “cult” to be defined by our general impressions rather than agreed upon criteria. Given that the word “cult” is used so widely across the political spectrum, defining what a cult is exactly is challenging. To venture a tentative definition, we might describe a cult as a group of people that has become terminally reactionary or unable to meaningfully contribute to liberatory goals. This development may occur at its conception or it may be the result of a gradual process of degradation.
For groups that claim an interest in getting us free, a “cult” is the absolute last thing they wish to be called. Becoming widely recognized as a cult represents a negative finality that demonstrates an inability to dismantle oppressive systems. To brand an organization a cult is to disempower the organization to a certain extent, whether or not the label sticks. It is for this reason that using the term is generally considered taboo.
Marxists may be familiar with this infamous map of trotskyist organizations in america charting split after split between political parties. In this dizzying maze are some of the recognizable names we see on many picket signs and banners that make it into media photographs. However, most of these names of organizations are unfamiliar to everyone who has been fortunate enough to avoid being caught in this century-long history of party disputes. Among marxists themselves, many agree on which parties can appropriately be called a cult. Generally, the smaller the sect, the easier it is to label them cults and move on. The larger the sect, the more confidently accusations are dismissed.
Compared with the technical language, jargon, and theories leftist ideologies use to communicate goals and ideas, “cult” is far plainer language by contrast. Cult is a common concept used across the political spectrum. Given that there is great emphasis placed on political education among leftist formations, we are, understandably so, less inclined to accept criticism from those who are less familiar with our respective ideologies. In this context, accusing an organization of being a cult is one of the more likely criticisms to be dismissed in this imbalance of understanding.
While it may be more commonplace today than it was to ridicule marxist leninists (or MLs) who insist on reading all three volumes of Das Kapital before critiquing communists, we still see this dynamic at play among other political tendencies. As an example, abolitionists who utilize transformative justice frameworks are more or less pacifists, objecting to anything they categorize as “punishment” for abusers. In their framework, anyone who is unconcerned about these categorizations in pursuit of more safety for survivors and less tolerance of abusers is dismissed and erroneously likened to the police who carry on the legacy of slave patrols. This functions very similarly to how marxist leninists tend to dismiss all discussions of unique forms of oppression marginalized people are subjected to as “identity politics” that lack an analysis of class. There is much in common between abolitionists who fervently believe in TJ frameworks outlined by a select few practitioners and MLs who adhere to party lines determined by their cadre-led vanguards.
We find another example of political ideology being used to ignore critical aspects of reality in the way that some people utilize afropessimist texts. By design, afropessimist theory is rhetorically unassailable and that is an incredibly valuable trait for Black academics to have within white supremacist academia. Outside of academic contexts, many of us find in these texts affirmation of the severity of our struggles to survive anti-Blackness. Despite the efficacy of this lens for understanding how we are racialized and systemically oppressed, some groups use afropessimism as if it is an infallible predictive model for preventing and understanding interpersonal abuse. Rather than seeking to understand the complexity of dynamics found within abusive relationships, they mistakenly presume afropessimism is an appropriate substitute.
This misattribution inflicts the most damage on Black survivors who try to seek support when their abusers happen to also be Black. Paired with TJ frameworks, some networks will insist on protecting abusers from any and all consequences on the grounds they are Black and therefore should not have to bear a burden in addition to dealing with anti-Blackness. If a Black survivor is judged to not have a sufficiently Black community or support network, they may be blamed for being abused, or ostracized for needing support. In some instances, lighter skin Black survivors will find themselves not believed or counter-accused if their abuser is darker than them on the grounds that a proximity to whiteness automatically makes them an abuser. A shared belief in afropessimism as a predictive model of abuse creates an environment where an otherwise reasonable desire not to participate in anti-Blackness gets warped into a tolerance for anti-Blackness against Black survivors or interpersonal abuse generally.
Political ideologies are tools above all else, and, given that they exist as words and ideas, they are also endlessly malleable. They can be shaped to justify oppression as much as they can be used to inspire liberatory acts. We see this malleability in the ways that analyses of gender and queerness also get used as predictive models of abuse. Rates of patriarchal abuse of cis women by cis men becomes a presumption that abuse in lesbian relationships is always the fault of the more masc partner of the two. Likewise, what begins as a disambiguation of the different violences trans masc and trans femme people face becomes a presumption that one is more likely to abuse the other in relationships.
People often reach for the malleability of ideology as a means of avoiding how exhausting it is to take meaningful action against interpersonal and systemic violence. It is far easier to victim-blame than hold space for the gruesome details of abuse that survivors have experienced. Blaming the primary targets of fascism for not voting is more than acceptable to people who can’t begin to fathom the totality of horrors global fascism inflicts upon us.
Telling each other we have permission to ignore those who have one too many criticisms of the organization we call our political home is a relief when the alternative is re-evaluating the ways we move and interact with each other. Taking solace in the fact that few, if any, in the room are masked is far more convenient than recognizing that pretending this ongoing pandemic is over endangers your own life as well as everyone else with whom your life is interdependently connected. The near absence of solidarity with immunocompromised people and the apparent disinterest in stopping this ongoing pandemic have helped contribute to the criminalization of masks in america. Inflated police budgets and neglect from would-be comrades both increase the number of mortal threats we must navigate and restrict our avenues of effective struggle.
Our analyses of how ableism and eugenics have developed from the institution of chattel slavery help us understand how white supremacy threatens our lives. Yet we see these analyses misused to erase the anti-Blackness evident in the increased risk Black workers face in a world that has chosen to pretend today’s pandemic does not exist. In the name of covid consciousness we see the cost of masks, treatments, and vaccine apartheid under capitalism ignored. Among myriad forms of interpersonal abuse that are far from being stopped, we now must also struggle against forced transmissions whenever we share homes with covid denialists. These dynamics are further complicated by those who are forced to work jobs that lack covid precautions but also refuse to take precautions at home.
Those of us who continue taking precautions have been largely exiled from society. We disabled people have been left alone to survive a world that was always inaccessible but is now more lethally so. Alongside eugenics-imposed exile are survivors exiled from communities they once belonged to. Communities that, instead of providing support and building a sense of safety, chose to protect their abusers from any and all inconveniences. Even ex-members of political organizations become exiled for having criticized a group too much or for having lost capacity to keep up with the pace of work. We are exiled for not believing that a group’s public work outweighs a tolerance of abuse or capitulation to fascism.
Despite uses of political ideologies that contribute to our oppression rather than free us, the true value of these ideologies are their ability to describe the mechanics of oppression we deal with on a daily basis. Marxism is intended to help us end capitalism. TJ is ostensibly for dealing with instances of abuse. Afropessimism effectively exposes how chattel slavery continues to shape society as we know it today. We study eugenicist institutions so that we can one day abolish them. We analyze the way society marginalizes queer and trans people so we can survive long enough to see a world that materially supports our self-determination. We do our best to implement communal strategies of removing forms of oppression from everyday life, in large part influenced by our affinity with certain analyses of these obstacles to our freedom.
However, the danger arises when we mistake belief in and familiarity with political ideology for perfectly effective embodiment. We may seek to align ourselves with the values we hold, taking actions to crumble the power of capitalism, stop abuse, support trans self-determination and reproductive rights, or bring an end to eugenics and global anti-Blackness. But the success of those actions depends upon how robustly we can build up our collective capacity, not how infallibly we can present our favorite ideologies. Implementing strategies that demonstrably keep us alive and safe from reactionary violence is directly tied to our ability to prevent oppressive systems from functioning as intended.
Ultimately though, there is no point at which a person is so well-versed in a political ideology that they become literally unable to participate in any oppressive systems. Knowledge of ideology does not suggest an inability to harm or abuse others, nor does it imply an incapability of capitulating to or apologizing for pillars of fascism. Ideology alone will never reveal to us the infinite contours of our lived experiences of this white supremacist world. Nowhere have our efforts to get free surpassed the need for spaces to communicate our needs and capacity. Ideology used as a substitute for collective clarity about how we are each shaped by our circumstances and conditions will always inevitably mistake reactionary behaviors for liberatory actions.
We’ve seen the damage that mistaking belief systems for adequate care networks can inflict on our lives. This is part of why many people have begun pushing back against the use of slogans like “join an org, any org” as they use a fear of exile and precarity as sufficient reasons to ignore a group’s history and practices. It contributes to our being exiled and alone in the face of mounting systemic violence. When we begin recognizing traits we typically associate with cults in groups, networks, and relationships, we often find the threat of exile at the heart of these dynamics.
Is Rejecting Co-optation Enough?
Unlike how rarely we tend to consider the label “cult” may be accurate, the term co-optation is readily used to describe apparent misuses of leftist ideologies. Simply stating that one implementation of a belief system is obviously flawed while another obviously isn’t feels like a more or less satisfying explanation. Indeed, this is often the case, especially when those who have not yet “done the work” access and use technical terms without political education. Words used clearly out of context or opposite their meaning are generally easy to identify. Still, co-optation isn’t the full picture, and we do ourselves a disservice when we limit our understanding of how our ideologies can be misused to this singular concept.
Sometimes organizational abuse in leftist circles presents itself as the logical conclusion of these belief systems. Co-optation typically takes the form of those who actively participate in oppressive dynamics (i.e. liberals, politicians, etc.) attempting to disguise themselves as more aligned than they are with anarchism, communism, abolitionism, or another leftist ideology. By contrast, cults within the left operate by presenting themselves as the most aligned with a leftist ideology, calling into question the authenticity of anarchists, communists, and abolitionists outside of their influence.
Cults may use co-optation techniques to cover up their own shortcomings. However, we typically see co-optation used to assimilate radicals into reformist frameworks. This differs from how cults coerce radicals into creating fringe forms of power that benefit individuals at the expense of the group. By turning radicals’ own beliefs against them, leftist cults identify ways their targets are vulnerable to precarity or insecure about their ability to meaningfully contribute to liberatory efforts. Once identified, a target’s well-intentioned openness to feedback becomes fearful motivation to act in spite of themselves or in more and more reactionary ways. The goal of co-optation is to coerce radicals into unwitting compromise with reactionary systems, whereas leftist cults coerce radicals into becoming gradually consumed by reactionary systems.
Typically a cult’s power primarily benefits an individual leader above all else, with some of those benefits going to their most loyal followers, but this does not have to be the case. Informal networks may develop cult dynamics, and a single relationship between two people can be built upon cult-like foundations. Like abusers who present themselves as too important to “the work” to concede power and influence, cults may engage in direct service efforts that seem to justify the cult’s existence in spite of its flaws. That same direct service may win the loyalty of its most vulnerable members.
This is not dissimilar to how abusers typically do not show the worst sides of themselves while they are initially drawing someone into a relationship. They may start with testing boundaries or make the occasional antagonistic comment, but their worst behaviors are usually reserved for when a person has already become entrapped and isolated within a relationship. Likewise, a cult may only ask its members to excuse or participate in the most reactionary elements of its work after they’ve become sufficiently isolated from people who would object to how they are being treated and shaped.
A leftist cult may start with promises of actualizing your revolutionary potential, encourage you to be vulnerable rapidly, and/or seem to offer the exact form of support you may have become desperate for in the aftermath of a recent personal crisis. Through a number of coercive strategies designed to develop and worsen your insecurities while taking advantage of your fervent desire to develop a better world, the cult becomes the next thing you find yourself needing to heal from.
Compared with the previous decade, the importance of care work and survivor support are far more popular now than they were then. Despite how commonplace anti-survivorship has become, fewer leftists tolerate open defense of abusers now. While mutual aid has undoubtedly become co-opted by everyone ranging from the state itself to white middle class liberals, the internet age has allowed us marginalized folks to greatly expand our efforts to create support networks and access resources. Because these developments are clear and observable, opportunists, bad actors, and abusers alike have all adapted their coercive strategies for this shift in leftist cultural environments.
As a result, language and education resources that very recently seemed to suggest the person using them might be safer to interact with, now comparatively indicate very little. Use of such terms has been absorbed into those commonplace gestures and niceties necessary to avoid scaring away would be targets of abuse and recruitment into cults. Typical of those who frequently engage in abusive or exploitative behaviors, they have looked upon our attempts to develop support networks with envy, despite the fact that we still struggle to survive. Now it’s not unlikely to find abusers putting great effort into gesturing as TJ practitioners or as someone genuinely willing to engage in survivor support. When exposed, we unfortunately discover they targeted vulnerable survivors and encouraged them to drop their guard long enough to be taken advantage of. Once their respective communities reach a shared understanding of the truth of what happened, we often find that abusers still cling to their malicious uses of the political ideologies that enabled their actions until the very end.
It is deeply upsetting that we must confront this reality, where there are more consequences than ever to mistakenly thinking we’ve discerned enough. Fascism readily affirms any belief that untethers people from the reality of its oppression. The surveillance state and covid denialists work in tandem to make it more difficult to establish networks of collective care and strategies for dismantling eugenicist normalcy. But, as we survivors have always been saying, our approaches to community must begin with centering consent in our interactions. A slower pace of work is worth the added clarity about who all has shown up in shared spaces, what our capacity is, what work we do and do not consent to, and how differently or similarly we interpret the same language.
The more we push each other to act collectively without an understanding of our varied access needs and the different kinds of struggles we each face, the more we sabotage our attempts to get free with inaccessibility. Obsession with supposed liberatory strategies that put scale and numbers above all else will only ever worsen the exile of those of us who are already in the margins of society. With more decentralized approaches to the task at hand we make it easier to deepen affinity and actualize a collective capacity that can reliably engage in protracted struggle.
Fascism paves its own future with billions of compromises that will see you making peace with the very antithesis to liberation. Overcoming a fear of being exiled is absolutely essential if we are to make an empowered stand against the many forms of oppression that structure daily life. In the fiction that covid denialists occupy they anticipate and push for our breaking points where we might become as complicit as they are in continuing this ongoing pandemic. But in our exile we have not become severed from reality. The circumstances that necessitate our precautions have not disappeared, so we remain in the margins of society as stubborn reminders of the futility of believing a period of genocide and mass disablement will not affect you.
In our resolve to survive the sheer lethality of white supremacy we reject compromise. We will not forsake those who should still be alive today and romanticize complicity into something courageous and freeing. It is imperative that we refrain from substituting ideas and schemas for compassionate coordination. Should there ever be a generation of people who have never borne witness to genocide and oppression, they will exist because we stopped excusing capitulation to and apologism for fascism. They will understand the turning point in our trajectory during this mass extinction event was carved out by those who were once exiled, not exalted in an era that hungered for the world’s destruction.
Disclaimers and Reflections
As much as I write in support of those who face similar forms of exile, my own exile has so far prevented me from talking much about those who’ve had a hand in my isolation. One of my own abusers was deeply invested in trying to convince me to stop writing, telling me writing can’t help people. Her goal was always always for me to platform them and their milieu’s work, hoping to convince me to write for their needs rather than my own and the needs of those I hoped to help. She and cult leaders I followed in the past all shared this insistence on discouraging me from having agency over my own writing. It was important to them that I viewed my writing as useless insofar as I was not using my writing abilities in exactly the capacities they specified.
When I consider the harm and abuse I’ve experienced in just the past 5 years of this project, as well as the awful things people have disclosed to me about what they’ve experienced, it is hard for me not to consider that she may have been right. Several of the abusers I’ve seen exposed were also people I used to see generating discourse about terms and concepts I’d just posted about when I was trying to share something every week. It was predictable that vulnerable marginalized people may discuss things I’d recently written about, and so blending in with them became a more viable strategy. Eventually I’d receive reportbacks that survivors who managed to expose abusers in regions I’ve never lived in were surprised to learn these abusers were also talking about my work, liking my posts, or following me.
Devastated to learn of this developing trend, I questioned whether my writing helped any survivors or disabled people. If not for support and encouragement from survivors and leftists I knew and respected, I think I would have definitively concluded that my own abusers were right. Still, I’ve since changed the way I share my work. I’ve made it inconvenient for opportunists to repurpose my writing. I’ve gone out of my way to make it clear that I reject practices from those I consider myself politically opposed to. And I’ve become further exiled because of it and I face far more precarity now than I did a year ago.
Between covid denialists making public life inaccessible and my aversion to leftist spaces with unresolved conflicts, it’s been difficult finding recourse from the very things I try to warn people about. I stopped offering consultations about conflict interventions because I lacked the support network and resources necessary to carry on that work and provide survivors a fair shot at getting their needs met. I’ve received enough stories about people using their status and platform to prey upon others that I’ve completely abstained from casual interactions with anyone who only knows me through my work. For this reason I limit myself to only working relationships where this is the case.
As someone who already struggles with depression, anxiety, dysphoria, and the traumas I've suffered over the course of my life, bearing witness to global fascism regularly threatens my desire to live. Being exiled from society while carrying so much uncertainty about how to build and connect with people I trust has been an unbearable burden at times. But I am kept in this world by people who, even as they struggle to hold heavier burdens than I, still refuse to compromise with a world that is killing us. I am inspired by those who deny fascists the satisfaction of seeing us give up on getting free. I see people fighting similar fights against eugenicist normalcy who reject endlessly repackaged and disguised victim-blaming from those who would have us call them comrades.
When I think about how surviving today’s fascism means observing the ways this generation will be impacted by preventable wounds, illnesses, and death over the span of decades, I am admittedly frightened. But I understand that is the task before us, and that we will adapt to our circumstances as needed until the day we shape a world that has abolished scarcity and oppression.