Our opposition to lifestylism, performativism, purity culture, and political unseriousness, and the constructive meaning of our post-leftism.

By Vaarla Ona

Our frustration:

What exhausts us is the expectation that good intentions should settle questions about what people actually support. Someone can be compassionate in their immediate relationships while defending political arrangements that expose others to exploitation, exclusion, or violence. Their kindness gives us something to value, but it cannot answer for those commitments. When we ask someone to examine why they believe something or whether their actions contradict their values, that question deserves consideration. Instead, criticism can be treated as an attack on their goodness, and protecting that self-image becomes more urgent than understanding the concern. This becomes especially frustrating when enormous energy is available for arguments over preferences and symbols, while examining a consequential political choice is dismissed as too demanding. Everyone has limits, and difficult conversations sometimes need to wait. The problem is repeatedly refusing the examination while continuing to claim the seriousness of someone committed to liberation. Virtue requires cultivation: learning, developing better habits, recognizing mistakes, and allowing what we discover to change how we live.

Our concern is the willingness to make consequential choices while treating their examination as optional. A conviction doesn’t become responsible simply because it feels natural, familiar, or consistent with the kind of person we believe ourselves to be. We need to understand what shaped it, what it supports, and what would give us reason to reconsider it. When a concern is answered only with an assurance of good intentions, the people affected are left with no account of why the conduct is justified. We can respect someone’s dignity while questioning their judgment. We can recognize a sincere wish to help while asking whether the response actually helps. The frustration comes from having to defend these ordinary responsibilities of thought as though expecting them were an unreasonable demand.

This also explains our objection to treating political problems as apolitical matters of personal preference. Questions about ownership, access, work, and the control of shared resources concern how power operates. Declining the political label leaves those relationships in place. A demand becomes limited when it asks those in control for better treatment without developing the collective strength to hold them accountable or challenge their authority. Seeking a narrower protection can matter, but it cannot stand in for the larger work of liberation. We want people to follow their concerns far enough to confront what produces them. An unexamined liberal or conservative response offers no escape from that responsibility. Neither does avoiding disagreement by leaving the political implications of a demand unspoken. Change requires people prepared to organize around those implications and secure powers that goodwill alone cannot provide.

Lifestylism, performativism, purity culture, and political unseriousness:

Lifestylism gives this avoidance a political form by shrinking a struggle over power into a collection of personal preferences and consumer decisions. Personal practices can reduce particular harms, but we need to explain what they accomplish and how they connect to wider change. Choosing among arrangements controlled by others does not automatically challenge the power those others hold over our lives. A politics centered on those choices can retain the limits of ordinary consumer freedom while adopting revolutionary language. Our objection begins when the choice itself becomes sufficient evidence of resistance and anyone questioning its usefulness is accused of lacking commitment. A political strategy needs an account of the power being confronted, the means through which it can be challenged, and the freedom people stand to gain.

Performativism develops when recognition for taking a stance becomes more important than carrying its responsibilities through. An expression of concern may communicate a purpose or invite participation, but its visibility cannot establish that the purpose has been fulfilled. We need to follow the commitment into what people can actually receive, decide, and change. Even gathering people who agree leaves the question of how they will gain influence over the decisions they oppose. Organizing becomes effective through the strength people develop together and their ability to use it toward a defensible goal. When asking about that connection threatens the group’s image, the performance has begun protecting itself from the work it claims to represent.

Purity culture reinforces the problem by measuring people against approved choices rather than examining their circumstances and conduct. The ability to withdraw can then become a mark of superior commitment, while people with fewer alternatives are treated as morally suspect. Attention turns inward, toward policing belonging, while the institutions creating the dependency face less scrutiny. A political response should help people become less dependent and more able to act together. It should make participation accessible and examine whether a proposed alternative creates new exclusions. Political unseriousness appears when these consequences are dismissed while moral authority is still claimed for the decision. We should be able to give reasons, hear objections, and revise an approach that fails the people it was meant to serve.

Doing the work also requires us to distinguish an action we can carry out from one capable of securing the change we seek. Interrupting or damaging a system can leave those controlling it with the resources and authority to restore the same arrangement. Individual withdrawal can leave them free to continue without us. A radical political response reaches the root: who owns, who governs, who benefits, and who has the power to make the harm continue. It requires investigation, collective organization, and measures suited to changing those relationships. Public pressure, democratic action within communities and municipalities, and the acquisition of common resources can help people gain lasting authority. Their effectiveness must be examined through what changes, including whether rights become secure and decisions become answerable to those affected. Liberation, socialism, and democracy should give this work a clear direction toward shared control and freedom from domination. Forceful gestures and declarations cannot establish those achievements on their own.

Post-Leftism and the Work of Liberation:

Our post-leftism follows from refusing automatic loyalty to a political identity that can shelter these failures. Calling something progressive, socialist, or revolutionary cannot establish that it helps people become freer, especially when criticism is suppressed or domination is defended for the sake of loyalty. Agreement against capitalism leaves essential questions about ownership, public authority, and protected rights unanswered. Replacing one unaccountable power with another would leave the people subject to it without self-government. We seek a communalist politics through which workers and residents gain effective control over shared resources and common affairs, with rights that remain secure when they disagree. That purpose requires us to examine the arrangements a movement builds as carefully as the language through which it describes itself.

We therefore separate from leftism as a whole and develop communalism as a distinct political project. We share concerns and insights with other left traditions, including opposition to exploitation and commitments to equality, care, or collective ownership. Those agreements are insufficient to make our projects the same. Similar language can conceal incompatible answers to who should govern, what rights dissenters retain, and how people gain control over their lives. We regard leftism as a dead term for a coherent common project because it gathers those contradictions beneath a presumed shared identity without resolving them. Its claim on our allegiance has ended. Moving beyond it means developing a communalist program grounded in popular self-government, social ownership, ecological responsibility, and protected individual and minority rights. Cooperation with people who remain leftists can serve purposes we genuinely share. It does not erase our separation or require us to return to the framework we have left behind.

Fighting for liberation requires a different way of engaging with one another. We need to explain our reasons, listen carefully, investigate what we don’t understand, and accept that a sincere conviction can still be mistaken. Those raising criticism carry that responsibility too. Cooperation can begin around useful work without demanding agreement about everything, and commitments should be proportionate to what people can sustain. The work should make care dependable, develop collective strength, and give people ways to challenge power without losing their basic security. It must also leave room for rest, disagreement, and quiet lives. Our frustration comes from seeing these responsibilities displaced by the easier achievement of appearing politically righteous. We want convictions that survive examination and organization through which people acquire the means to govern their shared world.