Street art on the frontage of the Köpi in Berlin. Credit: A. E. Elliott. All rights reserved.
There is good reason for people on the left to have divisiveness on their minds. In the news and on social media, the leftists that are shown most often are those that are ranting and raging at each other, calling each other out over this badly-phrased thought or that impulsive tweet, or exposing one another as less liberal or tolerant than their comrades. We're also regularly force fed images of 'activists' who are dressed identically in black, attacking cops who themselves seem to be dressed for a round on Robot Wars.
There’s a common theme underlying both kinds of coverage: in it, we only ever see the left wing in a state of conformism, a state of attack against whatever doesn't fit neatly into its narrow parameters of 'ideal.’ At a subconscious level, this preconditions us to view activism as a rejection, rather than an affirmation of certain ideals. As a result, fear, not hope, becomes the public's only motivation for living up to the left's demands.
Perhaps this unbalanced view of left-wing activism is the only one that the media is capable of giving us. The media is a mirror which reflects what it knows how to see, and conformist executives who live in fear of being rejected by their peers will tend to identify with activists who behave in the same way. So the kinds of left-wingers who are depicted in the media are necessarily a reflection of the media industry's own biases.
Unfortunately, these same biases can also be found in Berlin's left wing scene where I live and work.
Instead of fighting back against the prevailing status quo, many activists here seem happy to mirror its habit of excluding or rejecting anyone who doesn't fit into their ideal of what defines an ‘ethical’ person. Even looks are grounds for exclusion, it seems: I recently heard about a queer collective in Berlin that is refusing to admit anyone who wears dreadlocks or ear plugs, on the grounds that such styles amount to ‘cultural appropriation.’
Leaving aside the question of which culture can claim to be the true originator of dreads or plugs, is this a practical model of how the left can achieve meaningful social change? Or is it another case of leftists slotting their ideals into a pre-existing social construct and limiting their efforts to negation, because that's what the superficial mainstream tells them to do?
A few years ago when I was organizing my first Berlin party with some people from the London free party scene, I took them to the Köpi, a local underground venue, to ask the collective there if we could rent their cellar. When a punked-out resident of the Köpi eventually appeared in the doorway (covered from head to toe in band names, political slogans, tattoos and pins), we told him that we were interested in renting the cellar for a party. “We don’t do commercial parties here, sorry,” he snapped, and a few seconds later he was shutting the door in our faces.
