RadfahrerKampf
It came to my attention a few months ago that being a bicyclist in New York City is just like being really into leftist politics in New York City. Think about it. I was a solitary biker when I first arrived, perilously making my way through the city by myself for months before I was stopped one day in front of the Williamsburg bridge by cops who had set up a trap to issue fines to bicyclists going the wrong way on a bike lane. I was pulled over with ten other bicyclists who had also been pulled over. We were all helmeted white guys going on our merry way who muttered under our breath about our communally inflicted social injustice.
A few weeks later at the mouth of that same bridge I was waved down by some civil society group that was advocating for bikers in the city. Advocating? For my subculture? Wait, there are issues that effect other people like me by light of the fact that we commute using bikes? Coming off the bridge onto Delancey is a death trap for others too? It was a revelation. But as I thought about having shared interests, I started thinking about class in general, and all of the 18th Brumaire-inspired things I've learned about and into which I'm supposed to funnel every last political thought I might have. As I dart down the Bowery, or crowd in behind a line of bikers trailing some fucking putz with ankle reflectors and rearview mirrors attached to his helmet, I play around the the analogy in my head.
Starting with the mode of production, which I would analogize to commuting, the means of production would be how you got around. Subway commuters are the middle class un-proletarianized service sector to whom young marxists are always trying to ascribe agency (we're always shot down ("no, no, only long shore-men can have a meaningful strike")). People with the selfish audacity to driver private vehicles in the city on a week day are the bourgeois or its patriarchal-chauvanist working-against-their-true-class-interests supporters (Nascar dads). Delivery truck and bus drivers are the industrial proletariat. This part of the analogy is bad, but bear with me. The analogy works from the perspective of the hardened minority of progressive bleeding heart do-gooders (bicyclists) who have a more just and utopian vision of the morning commute.
A bicyclist in the city tries to use solidarity and organizing to advocate for changes to the means of commute, mainly by setting an example themselves and using a heavy dose of self-righteousness. It reminds me endlessly of the progressive left writ large. Aspiring for a critical mass of equally conscientious co-op buyers will eventually lead to the eschatological dawn of the eco-socialist version of food production and distribution (I've tried to write an article about how attempts to slowly erode the commodity system in the food justice movement is easily criticized from the Marxist a la critique of the Gotha Program perspective in that
You might get some nice community places like the Park Slope co-op, but you can't ignore the law of value when it is every other place you step. Although, to be fair, I have never really heard anyone talk about the Food justice endgame. Maybe communists come off as zealots because they have the audacity to the think about teleology )
Anyways, there is this idea in the biking community (from what I've read on bike blogs (of what I could stomach)) that bike lanes will grow and eventually reach the tipping point where NYC will be a bike friendly city. The oppressive rule of the automobile, and it's highways and intersections (withering of the state?), will be replaced by the quiet eco-friendly comm(une)ters of the future. And human nature, free from the bonds of road rage, will blossom in the cooperative decorum of the age of bicyclism. (In this, just as in socialism, we look to the Scandanavian example as our shining real life example).
In the meantime there is the constant harassment, sabotage, and asymmetric competing for the open road between mainly the two-wheeled petit bourgeois and the reactionary vile spewing BMW driving pricks who double park in their bike lanes and endlessly threaten to door them within an inch of their life. The peugetelligentsia also wonders with disappointment, which more often devolves into condescension, why don't more people bike like them rather than riding under the ground in those stinky germ-fume aquariums? When will they see that it is in their best interest to be healthy and autonomous by bike? There is also, always ready to wheel out, the ecological argument. With the Global environmental apocalypse, the only thing that can save us is bike highways.
And last but not least, there is that conviction when you are the lone biker on the grid, and when you are the only Marxist you know in a new city, that it would be great to be part of a well organized group of like minded people. That feeling lasts until about 5 minutes after after coming across bikers in the city. They turn out to be 5 times more fucking annoying than people in cars. Either darting and homicidally cutting through pedestrians, giving us all a bad name (anarchists who break starbucks windows in marches) or ride so insufferably slow down the middle of the bike lane that you end up in a loser parade (baby boomer reformists and keynesians who turn youthful enthusiasm into reelecting Obama).
In the end you can't help but long to free yourself from the commuter class war chaos, and go on a nice ride in the country. This is the bike=leftwingpolitics version of pastoral surrender: giving up on smashing the state to go churn goat milk on a commune.
A few weeks later at the mouth of that same bridge I was waved down by some civil society group that was advocating for bikers in the city. Advocating? For my subculture? Wait, there are issues that effect other people like me by light of the fact that we commute using bikes? Coming off the bridge onto Delancey is a death trap for others too? It was a revelation. But as I thought about having shared interests, I started thinking about class in general, and all of the 18th Brumaire-inspired things I've learned about and into which I'm supposed to funnel every last political thought I might have. As I dart down the Bowery, or crowd in behind a line of bikers trailing some fucking putz with ankle reflectors and rearview mirrors attached to his helmet, I play around the the analogy in my head.
Starting with the mode of production, which I would analogize to commuting, the means of production would be how you got around. Subway commuters are the middle class un-proletarianized service sector to whom young marxists are always trying to ascribe agency (we're always shot down ("no, no, only long shore-men can have a meaningful strike")). People with the selfish audacity to driver private vehicles in the city on a week day are the bourgeois or its patriarchal-chauvanist working-against-their-true-class-interests supporters (Nascar dads). Delivery truck and bus drivers are the industrial proletariat. This part of the analogy is bad, but bear with me. The analogy works from the perspective of the hardened minority of progressive bleeding heart do-gooders (bicyclists) who have a more just and utopian vision of the morning commute.
A bicyclist in the city tries to use solidarity and organizing to advocate for changes to the means of commute, mainly by setting an example themselves and using a heavy dose of self-righteousness. It reminds me endlessly of the progressive left writ large. Aspiring for a critical mass of equally conscientious co-op buyers will eventually lead to the eschatological dawn of the eco-socialist version of food production and distribution (I've tried to write an article about how attempts to slowly erode the commodity system in the food justice movement is easily criticized from the Marxist a la critique of the Gotha Program perspective in that
“… Marx, throughout CAPITAL, insists that either you have the self-activity of the workers, the plan of freely associated labor, or you have the hierarchic structure of relations in the factory and the despotic Plan [of capital]. There is no in-between.
“The only possibility of avoiding capitalist crises is the abrogation of the law of value. That is to say, planning must be done according to the needs of the productive system as a human system. A system where human needs are not governed by the necessity to pay the laborer at minimum and to extract the maximum abstract labor for the purpose of keeping the productive system, as far as possible, within the lawless laws of the world market, dominated by the law of value.” You might get some nice community places like the Park Slope co-op, but you can't ignore the law of value when it is every other place you step. Although, to be fair, I have never really heard anyone talk about the Food justice endgame. Maybe communists come off as zealots because they have the audacity to the think about teleology )
Anyways, there is this idea in the biking community (from what I've read on bike blogs (of what I could stomach)) that bike lanes will grow and eventually reach the tipping point where NYC will be a bike friendly city. The oppressive rule of the automobile, and it's highways and intersections (withering of the state?), will be replaced by the quiet eco-friendly comm(une)ters of the future. And human nature, free from the bonds of road rage, will blossom in the cooperative decorum of the age of bicyclism. (In this, just as in socialism, we look to the Scandanavian example as our shining real life example).
And last but not least, there is that conviction when you are the lone biker on the grid, and when you are the only Marxist you know in a new city, that it would be great to be part of a well organized group of like minded people. That feeling lasts until about 5 minutes after after coming across bikers in the city. They turn out to be 5 times more fucking annoying than people in cars. Either darting and homicidally cutting through pedestrians, giving us all a bad name (anarchists who break starbucks windows in marches) or ride so insufferably slow down the middle of the bike lane that you end up in a loser parade (baby boomer reformists and keynesians who turn youthful enthusiasm into reelecting Obama).
In the end you can't help but long to free yourself from the commuter class war chaos, and go on a nice ride in the country. This is the bike=leftwingpolitics version of pastoral surrender: giving up on smashing the state to go churn goat milk on a commune.
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