Tommy and I talked about campus activism and the 2024 Palestine solidarity encampments, what education is and means, therapy (bad), friendship (good), and Marxisms. I’ve admired and been inspired by Tommy for as long as I’ve known them (and before that too). One time I sent them a message on Instagram saying “I love you my brave and beautiful friend,” then scrolled up and discovered that a few weeks ago I had sent them the exact same message. So there's that. Thank you for this, Tommy, and for your friendship! I love you!
If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-8-tommy/
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The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Otter and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
This interview was conducted virtually in August 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity, including substantial line edits by Tommy. Edits made by Jiaqi are in square brackets, but edits made by Tommy are not.
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Jiaqi Kang: Do you want to introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like?
Tommy: My name is Tommy. I live in a major city in the U.S. It's a city that's often called ‘America's poorest big city.’ It's interesting, actually, how that statistic is calculated. But for practical purposes, I’ll say that it’s a large de-industrialized American city. For that reason, its social contradictions are especially visible. I moved here for graduate school, so I'm in a position where I see on a daily basis the poverty of the city but remain largely insulated from it. I think that's an experience that a lot of transplants have, in one way or another.
I grew up in a nondescript American suburb, also in a very insulated environment. My parents immigrated here from China. I grew up well off while my parents grew up poor, which is another interesting tension to grapple with, and one that I’ve been learning to take more seriously in my relationship with them.
Although I'm in grad school, I find it increasingly difficult to identify as an academic. I believe in the value of teaching and learning, but I don’t know if it can be done in a truly beneficial way at a university that actively exploits the city’s most vulnerable communities and makes it less and less livable for ordinary people. Also, I'm a communist, not an anarchist—though maybe a few years ago I would have said the opposite.
JK: How did you become politically engaged?
T: I'm glad that you phrase it that way, because I think the more common term is something like ‘politically aware.’ Only in the past few years have I really understood the difference between being politically aware and being politically engaged.
I would say that I was first politicized in late high school, through reading fiction. I’ve loved to read for as long as I can remember. But it was mostly trashy YA novels until my senior year of high school, when I got it in my head that serious people read New York Times bestsellers. This is so embarrassing to me now, but it was novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Bell Jar that introduced me to the ideas of politics as an expansive part of everyday life. They weren’t particularly revolutionary, but they helped me to think beyond parties and politicians and the government.
After that, I moved on to leftist magazines like Jacobin and publishers like Verso and Haymarket. I remember proudly buying my first ‘Socialism for Dummies’ book towards the end of my senior year. It was intoxicating. As soon as I became aware of socialism, aware of communism, and aware of abolition—one of the other early books I read was Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete?—it felt obvious to me. It was a pretty quick transformation.
By the time I got to college, I was very vocal about my political beliefs, but it was a naive conviction: more about being right than doing right. In college, I cycled through various political organizations. I started out with the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]. This was a time when there was some genuine hope around DSA as a left party organization, before it was dismissed as a liberal reformist group. I should also say that I went to college in the South, and the Southern local chapters of these big national organizations were often doing their own thing. We were constantly talking about disaffiliating. That taught me something too—to be distrustful of institutionalized organizing.
Aside from the DSA, I was involved in anti-racist work under an umbrella organization. I think that was what introduced me to anti-Zionist organizing. There were several instances where members of our group were doxxed because of our pro-Palestine stance. All throughout college, I was politically engaged in various ways, but only up to a certain limit. I understood these activities as ‘extracurriculars.’ You choose a few things to do outside of your studies, and you dedicate X number of hours each week to them. It was very regimented.
Something I do think about a lot is that the summer after my first year—I guess I have to say the location; it was Charlottesville, Virginia—there was a white supremacist rally that took place in town. The school was tipped off, but they didn't do anything about it, didn’t even send out a warning. It was awful. A city resident and counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed during the rally by a guy who intentionally drove his car through the crowd. Several of my friends were injured. It really reshaped student politics at UVA. It mobilized people, and it created a real sense of urgency … it’s the only time I’ve really experienced a mass mobilization besides 2024. I remember going to a protest afterwards, and listening to a prominent local organizer give a speech. She said something like, “If you really care about the people of Charlottesville, you have to be willing to give up your degree for it.” I remember this silence descending upon the audience. There was a half second of total silence. You could tell that people felt uncomfortable, but also spooked, shocked. It was something that had never been said to most of us before.
I just kept thinking about that and feeling guilty about it for the next several years, as I was moving through different academic institutions. I had this feeling that I was not willing to sacrifice enough. And then in 2024 the encampments happened, and I basically dropped everything to help sustain the one at my current institution. I think that was really when things clicked for me. At that point, I did not care if I would get my degree or not, if I would be kicked out of school or not. I reached a point where it did not matter to me, and it was interesting because it didn't feel like a sacrifice—it felt like a kind of freedom, a kind of release. Having felt that, I now think differently about what it means to be involved in political action, especially action that feels risky or dangerous, and what those terms condition us to believe. Instead of thinking in terms of sacrifice, what if we thought in terms of freedom? As in, this work is something that frees all of us, rather than something that is a sacrifice for some people and freedom for other people.
JK: Thank you for that. I enjoyed hearing some stuff that I knew and some stuff that I didn't know as much. Late last year, you sent me some fragments that you wrote, and that moment where you wrote about, that woman that said, “If you really care about the people of Charlottesville, some of you are going to have to give up your degrees”—it really, really struck me as well.
For me, 2024 was [also] a sort of breakthrough, where I truly realized that, yeah, I didn't care whether I got my degree. I didn't care about being a student at a really good university. In fact, I didn't want these things at all anymore. [This realisation is] something that you have to experience in your own time. Afterwards, I realized [that in this lies] the failures of a lot of organizing or political engagement undertaken by people who happen to be students, especially students at an elite university. You just need to stop caring that you go to this elite university. Most people can't. I've seen the fissures and the failures around that. [There's] this extreme discursive divide between the people that still have to cling on to the fact that they attend so-and-so elite university, and what they think that they're entitled to [because of that].
I think I used to believe in this idea of the university as a place of learning that was being interfered with by outside forces like neoliberalism and conservatism. But what I've realized is that there is no university anymore. Our idea of the university as this kind of liberal institution of learning has actually already been dismantled.
T: It really never existed.
JK: Yeah, definitely. It was always predicated upon exploitation. The financial links are [also] so deep. Realizing that universities would rather do literally anything than let go of these financial complicities and links. I was naive, in that I didn't realize that before.
You and I, until 2024, both experienced doing all our degrees straight through, without any breaks—living off of academic excellence and the material benefits that come from that. By that point [2024], I was already like, “I don't care about these institutions, I'm just here to get what I can get and leave”—[but in 2024] the last bit of value that I found in that was totally shattered. It has left me wondering what it was that I wanted [from the academy in the first place]. I guess it was prestige and it was fluency—fluency of language, but fluency of movement as well, the ability to move fluently throughout the world.
T: Some of it is maybe… not leisure, exactly. But I do think it's true that both of us like to read, and both of us like to think, and both of us like to write. We’re led to believe that the university is a space where you have the unique freedom to do these things without constraint. Especially when you’re there on academic scholarship, there is this idea that you’re free from work, you have the privilege of spending your time thinking and reading and soaking up information.
I think it's important to think about that. It’s created a situation where a lot of people who have gone on to become professors, who are more deeply entrenched in the system than we are, continue to hold contradictory commitments and beliefs. There’s an entirely personal, romantic dimension to it that goes beyond political conviction. You can verbally reject the university as an institution, and still see it as the only place where you can do the kind of work that you want to do. That is something that is harder to uproot. If you’re in an English department, which is what I’m in, people will be suspicious of you if you don't have a rehearsed criticism or critique of the university. That criticism has been absorbed into the professional machinery of the field. It’s one of the reasons why I decided to study English, because I was like, “Oh, this is a safe haven. This is a place where you actually can believe in these things, and you're supported in that.” I thought that for a long time, despite feeling otherwise. I didn't understand why I still felt alienated in that space [due to my having] certain commitments.
Last year, I was suspended. I came back after being suspended and all semblance of that romantic vision had fallen away from me. My peers started treating me differently. They were uncomfortable around me. If you cross a line and your critique can no longer be remedied with thought experiments—if you become too pessimistic about the university—then people will start to reject you. It's a strange feeling. I don't even think that other people in the department were aware that they were doing this, but I could sense their discomfort. I could sense their resentment. I think part of it was because I was reminding them of something that they didn’t want to think about.
JK: A lot of people I know have experienced that in some ways: going back to your peers and they're like, “Oh, there's that weird person.” It makes me feel really, really crazy.
One of the big differences between the US and the UK encampments is that the US ones kind of all got forcibly destroyed very quickly, whereas a lot of the UK ones lasted for much longer. The one that I was at lasted a bit more than two months. Eventually, there was an eviction notice and it was dismantled by the members of the encampment—in response to the eviction notice, but also because the summer had already begun and there was just so little capacity and so much burnout to sustain it. The decision sort of was made based on what was worthwhile—it wasn't worth getting evicted by [bailiffs].
But at the very start, when it was still really unclear how the university was going to respond, it was also term-time. It was so crazy to leave that little pocket and just come across people having, like, a normal time. It felt so deeply—not just alienating, but repulsive. Obviously [because there should be] no business as usual in a genocide.
It was interesting to see the ways that the barometer or the measuring line shifted around what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protest. Initially everyone was really scared of how the university was going to react about the encampment. But, by not reacting, the university tacitly implied that the encampment was actually, like, fine. And then, subsequently, any escalation from the encampment—that was the ‘bad’ protest. Even though, technically, an encampment is already ‘bad,’ it's already a transgression.
I admire you for going back [because it’s so hard to]. I know that partly it's because you get funding, there are still these [material] opportunities for you to live the way that you want and need to live. For me, having to go back, I was like, “I just can't do this. I feel sick to my stomach.” Maybe it's also because of my field. I came to a lot of realizations that the fundamental [power dynamics] within a field like Chinese art history were just [too] hard for me to reconcile or be okay with.
T: Every day I think, “Should I drop out of grad school?” I really admire your decision. Part of it is also just having the courage to leave. [It’s] something that I don't really have a clear answer to right now, because it's true that I have several more years of funding. I'm in the dissertation stage, so it’s not like I really have to show up for anything. I haven't been doing much work. I've just been living off of the grad stipend, and that is really nice. I feel physically repulsed every time I step foot on campus.
JK: When you say [that] it takes a lot of courage to drop out, I guess it's true. I think [some] of the courage comes from [the fact that] this is the first time in my life that I've intentionally fucked something up for myself. And that feels really freeing. It was really scary, but now that I've done it, it feels so good. That's just me, though.
T: I like that way of putting it intentionally: fucking something up for yourself. And I really felt that way during the encampment. I think that I was almost wishing that the university would just expel me so that I wouldn't have to be the one to make that decision.
JK: Me too.
T: I’m just realizing that now.
JK: By the time that our disciplinary hearings actually took place, in June [2025], I had already dropped out. In fact—I didn't realize this at the time—I applied to drop out on the one year anniversary of my arrest. Technically, I was still being threatened with suspension at that disciplinary hearing, even though I had already dropped out. It was just such an insane and gleefully cruel process in which we were literally put on fake trial… I wanted them to unleash, to follow up with the cowardly [threats they had been making].
This is kind of hard to describe, but I think that I already felt that I had been kicked out after we were all banned from campus for three months. That was when I was like, “Well, actually, I never want to come into these libraries again.” But in the end, I still had to do it myself. I [am glad] that I got the chance to make that decision on my own.
How did you and I meet?
T: We met in Oxford. I think I was aware of you for a while, before we met, through Twitter. At the time, we were both blonde—we both had hair, and you still have hair, but I don't have hair anymore. I thought of you as, like, the other blonde queer Asian in Oxford. I have no idea how I found you on Twitter. I was just aware of you, and we actually met at a rally, didn't we? Do you remember what it was for?
JK: I do. It was Kill the Bill.
T: Whoa, okay, yeah, I totally forgot about that. We met at this protest, and I think I approached you because we were Twitter mutuals. I was like,“Hey, you're Jiaqi, right?” And you were like, “Oh yeah, are you—?” And then you said some other name. Who did you think I was?
JK: I thought you were someone called R.
T: [You were like], “You're R, right?” I was like, “No.” And it was so mortifying. That was how we met. I actually can't really remember how we became friends after that.
JK: I have things to say. I'm sorry that it was mortifying. It's all on me.
T: I'm joking. It was a little embarrassing. But I wasn't, like, crying about it.
JK: I was at the protest alone, and I had posted on Twitter, “Is anyone else going to this?” This mutual called R was like, “Oh, I might be there.” We were supposed to meet up, but they hadn't replied, so that's why my first conclusion was that you were R—because I was supposed to meet them. That year was the 2020-2021 academic year, when I just lived on Twitter. I was kind of running through my roulette of people that I was mutuals with, but I didn't know that you lived in Oxford.
But actually, before we met at that rally [or around the same period of time], we had a fleeting encounter that was also protest-related. We were both at the Sheikh Jarrah protest. I took a photo of your sign, but I didn't know it was you that was holding it. It was an abolitionist sign. I posted it on Twitter. You were like, “Hey, that's me.”
T: Oh, my god. I don't remember that at all.
JK: I actually also don't know how we ended up being friends, but then we were friends.
T: I remember going to your birthday party.
JK: …Also because you then became housemates with someone that I knew. Right, oh my god, you came to my birthday party and you made soju Yakult cocktails.
T: I was really trying hard. I definitely had a friend crush on you, and I was like, “I need to impress.”
JK: That makes me feel really happy, because I also had a friend crush on you, and I also didn't know how to actualize it. But then somehow it ended up happening. I'm so glad that we got to spend a really good year in person together.
T: You're actually one of the few people who I still regularly keep in touch with from Oxford. I'm really bad at keeping in touch with people.
JK: We had this sort of, slightly—I don't know, I don't want to say failed, but it was failed—attempt to create the ‘Oxford Free School.’
T: You're really pushing the limits of my memory. I don't remember anything. I barely remember what happened yesterday.
But yeah, we were inspired by stuff that was happening in the States at the time—some of my friends were involved in this ‘free school’ movement, where they would organize community courses on different topics. They were adjacent to the university but not affiliated with it. I don't know what's become of these schools now. But we tried to start a similar one in Oxford. I think we were both too busy and not organized or committed enough to sustain it.
JK: I think that that might have been when we started hanging out more. If my memory serves, the summer between the two academic years that you spent here, you messaged me being like, “Hey, I'd love to chat about this thing,” and then we met up at Branca and we talked about it. We tried to set it up. Looking back, I have different analyses of what happened… I would say that probably the main thing was just that we had no relationship to local Oxford in any real way.
But also, at the same time as that, we properly joined ACORN together.
T: I do remember that, yeah.
JK: We were just kind of hoping that the people that joined [the free school] would take on initiative and stuff. I guess [it was] maybe too horizontal in that way. A third issue was lack of spaces to meet and organize things that weren't either someone's house, a cafe, or tied to the university. [Ultimately], our worlds were too limited.
But I guess it's interesting to think back [on]. I think about all the different ways in which that kind of stuff—free education and people teaching each other—the different things that I've [since] observed, especially [workshops] teach-ins at the encampment and at squats and other occupations… I feel that I have more of an understanding of the different ways in which free education can take place. I don't know what you think about this…
T: About your analysis, or about free education?
JK: About any of this. About what it means—free education and people teaching each other, or people doing things together. Those are also two different things.
T: Looking back, I just don't remember that much. I didn't even realize that we had other members who were looped in. I thought it was just us, and we were never able to get it off the ground.
I think you're right that part of it was how insular our lives were. Our entire world was in and at the university. So how were we going to start a free school in the city of Oxford? I remember that we had a prospective theme for the curriculum, and it was, like, ‘robots,’ or something like that.
JK: Oh my god.
T: I was really procrastinating on developing any curriculum, because I was like, “I don't know a single thing about robots.”
JK: That's so funny. I totally forgot about that. I also didn't know [anything about robots]. This is what I remember: I remember that we then had a physical meeting, after we had launched the project, that included some random people that had shown up to the meeting. [Note: names redacted here.] Someone was like, “I'm gonna lead a mushroom foraging class,” but I didn't go. But then we did life drawing at my house, and [GA] was the model, I think.
T: I forgot that that was part of the free school!
JK: I still have the art [I made from that session]. But that was basically it. We wanted people to just start offering their own classes. But yeah, that didn't really take place. And we didn't have enough commitment or anything to create more of a structure.
I think sometimes I look back and I'm ashamed of it, because we made an Instagram account and stuff. So there's, like, evidence that we failed.
T: An email…
JK: Yeah, an email and a Discord channel. [I know it’s] not useful to be ashamed… Whatever.
When you're growing up, especially, maybe, in the kinds of elite academic environments that you and I might have known—[but also just] society—there's a lot of emphasis placed on innovation, novelty, startups and stuff like that. You're supposed to always be creating new things. You really see this with high schoolers who are, like, trying to get into Harvard. “I started this, I started that, blah blah,” but then there's such little follow through. I’ve come to feel suspicious of, or allergic to starting new things. People that are like, “We're gonna start this thing off the ground, from scratch, it's gonna be a new channel for blah blah blah.”
Nowadays, especially when it comes to community initiatives, I'm always like, “Okay, but what are the existing things taking place that might benefit from you plugging in, from your input?” But then it's hard because sometimes, projects fall apart because of very valid fundamental conflicts.
T: That's interesting. I do remember you feeling a lot of shame about it not panning out. I don't think I felt the same way, but also, as we started to develop it and people weren't really showing up I did start to wonder, “What are we doing here? What's the purpose of this?” And having, maybe not shame, but definitely some thoughts similar to yours: “Why are we starting something new? There are plenty of existing initiatives that could use our help.” I think that's partly why I started disengaging.
To your point about novelty, I think you're right that there's this rampant startup mentality that needs to be combatted. But on the other hand, there's also a habitual resistance to doing anything differently than it's been done in the past, often within organizing circles. At least in the groups that I've been involved in [the city where I live now], that has become an issue.
We wanted a free school because we had all these unresolved and unacknowledged feelings about academia brewing under the surface—it was an expression of our discontent. But we framed it as, “Oxford needs a free school,” rather than, “We have serious grievances with the system that we're in.”
JK: And “We want to get more involved with Oxford outside of just the university.” In some ways, I think we did—not through that, but through ACORN, for example. I'll always be so grateful for going to the door-knocking workshop together, and then going to door-knock—learning how to do that. I would never have been able to do that without you there. And it's really funny, because I also remember this moment during the door-knocking workshop, when [the organiser] instructed everyone to pair up. And then he looked at us two, and he had this almost contemptuous expression on his face when he was like, “Oh, not you two. You guys are, like, best friends or something, so you two have to pair up with other people.” I was like, “I get it,” but the way that he said it… Looking back, I was like, “Why did he say it like that?” I was struck by the way that he said it, as if there's something wrong with going to a door-knocking workshop with your friend. Whereas, for me, that is the only way I would have gone.
T: That's interesting. I totally forgot about that moment, too.
JK: What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
T: There's this definition of care I used to like a lot, that I was just thinking about this morning. I feel more ambivalent about it now, but it comes from an anthropologist named Jarrett Zigon, who wrote a book on drug user communities and the anti-drug war movement. He had this notion of care not as ‘caring for’ or ‘taking care of,’ but instead as ‘being with’ and ‘letting be.’ I guess I still find it useful in some ways. I like his shift from the paternalistic idea that some people need to be taken care of—where care is a necessary burden or sacrifice—to care as a form of mutuality, a form of communion.
At the same time, it doesn’t feel quite robust enough. I don’t think it’s enough to say that care is just about being present and honoring other people’s autonomy. I think we need structures of care, practices of care—that care is a muscle that needs to be actively exercised, and not just a passive mode of orientation.
It’s interesting to consider this in relation to all of the therapeutic industries that have blown up in the last decade or so. Therapy is now a kind of given. Among the left, or at least the cultural left, you’ll hear things like “Oh, they need to go to therapy” or “My therapist told me the other day that …” Going to therapy has become routine; it’s understood as a very basic aspect of dealing with whatever emotional issues you may have. I don’t know, maybe this is problematic of me, but after a few years of being in therapy, I started to think, “What’s the point?” I felt like anything my therapist or psychiatrist could tell me, I could already tell myself. I found that I was performing for them, rather than really organically addressing the problems I had. I was focused on ‘doing well’ in this controlled space where my job was to perform an understanding of my issues—kind of like academia.
I’ve realized that a therapist is not the person I want to be talking to about my most intimate emotions. I want to talk to a friend, someone I have a real relationship with. It’s baffling to me how this kind of care has been privatized, and how that privatization has been so normalized that it’s basically immune from the critiques of privatization that people often have about other industries. Something I feel is important to develop among the left, among our own little local communities, is the capacity to care for one another, the willingness to put real work into it.
The negative connotation of the term ‘emotional labor’ is also part of the problem. I think that people absolutely need to perform ‘emotional labor’ for the people around them, that it’s a key responsibility we have towards one another. And I also think that it’s ultimately a much more sustainable and meaningful solution than having everyone sent off to therapy to deal with their issues, so that they don’t trouble others with it. We should be troubled by the issues of the people around us. We have a responsibility to them, and to ourselves, to be able to locate the sources of the feelings we’re experiencing—often, those sources are social and material. We’re doing a disservice to ourselves by relinquishing any possibility of self-knowledge or self-discernment, and thinking that it’s only a professional who can tell us what’s wrong.
JK: Do you think that you have experienced a good example of that?
T: Yeah, I feel like that's really how I've made it through the last few years. Like I said, I had seen various therapists and psychiatrists before I moved to this city. Part of weaning off of that has meant opening up to people around me in a way I sometimes avoided before, because it’s easier to talk to a professional—precisely because it feels disconnected from your day-to-day. There are fewer ramifications: whatever you say in the room, stays in the room.
In a more immediately political context, I think of the community that arose out of the encampment. A lot of us experienced traumatic things together. And it was never like, “We all need to go to therapy for this.” Instead, we felt like we needed to spend time with each other in order to work through these things, and it was the fact that we had shared the experience that enabled us to help one another. These everyday forms of care can be found in movements everywhere.
JK: The people that I was arrested with, I continue to feel like a really strong connection to. But what I've come to realize, with a lot of different conflicts that have taken place since [the encampment], is also that [getting arrested together] doesn't automatically mean… I think there was a moment where I was like, “Wow, the community of people that I have met through this encampment and through this way of being politically engaged that I had not experienced before and that has opened up new worlds and new relationalities for me… Wow, this place is wonderful.” That was heightened by the fact that I then left for seven months and was so homesick, so nostalgic and so lonely.
[As time went on], I also realized that that's not enough to keep people together, and that a lot of fundamental issues will not [automatically be overcome]. The love and care that you have for a comrade won't overcome, [for example,] racism or whiteness. At the end of the day, this is a bunch of white people. Which is crazy, because it was also my first time being around a bunch of white people in such a long time. Usually I'm so careful about not ending up in that kind of context.
I've been thinking a lot about the feelings circle as a concept.
T: I don’t know what that is.
JK: You can have a very formal way of doing it, but essentially [what I mean by] a feelings circle is when you sit in a circle and talk about your feelings. It became a kind of meme among us because we were in the middle of having a feelings circle when the police came in to arrest us at our [sit-in]. We were like, “I feel like…” [Laughs.] After we were arrested, we had this picnic where we had another feelings circle, but it was in a garden so we couldn't talk too much because we didn't want to be overheard by neighbors. [We started jokingly saying, “I had a dream where…” as a way to obfuscate it.]
Then in Provincetown, I had this weird, slightly surreal experience of being in a facilitated discussion circle with someone who [was] literally paid… [They] professionally facilitate circles. And I actually really enjoyed it. I found it super interesting, even though, fundamentally, I, like, didn't care about strengthening my community ties with the other people at my fellowship. I was like, “I want to go home and do this with everyone that I know in this landscape.” I think people need to talk, people need to hear each other out. That was kind of attempted as well, but, I don't know, some people don't want to listen, or some people aren't ready to listen [and you can’t force that].
In many ways, I still believe in the feelings circle, because it's fundamentally just: you talk about how you feel, and everyone gets to speak. But I've also found it slightly amusing how hard it can be to really get people to pay attention to each other. I guess a big reason why is just because people don't think that it's important. Or, even if they do, it might be in the way that you say, where it's like, “They should just go off and do therapy about it.” People don't think that it's important to process, or talk about, or digest and hold their emotions with each other. Every time I think about this stuff, I suddenly become that woo-woo white lady at the farmer's market.
T: No, I get it. I also feel instinctively resistant to the idea of a feelings circle—even just the phrase ‘feelings circle.’ I wonder if some of the feeling of corniness or unseriousness is coming from, like what you're saying, [the fact that] people actually just don't take it seriously and see it as a performative gesture. Most of my experiences with this kind of care have been one-on-one experiences, and they haven't necessarily even been like, “Oh, we're getting together to talk about our feelings.” It's implicit in whatever conversation we're having.
JK: …Which I also think is funny, because then it also sounds a little bit like you're saying that you didn't start telling your friends how you felt until recently.
T: Actually, no, that's not true. I’ve had close friends who were also kind of emotional confidantes since early college, and I was confiding in them alongside therapy. I felt more of a block when it came to therapy, which I thought was just a me problem. For a long time, I was like, “This is a defense mechanism. This is a psychological problem.” In the last few years, I've realized that such a feeling is natural and that there's no reason why we should feel most comfortable sharing our deepest thoughts to a stranger.
But at the same time, when you were talking about how, in Provincetown, you had that professional facilitator come in—I think that the vast majority of the public has kind of been de-skilled in that way. People don't really know how to … Not just how to facilitate group conversations, but even how to respond to a close friend’s emotional distress. People don't really learn how to do that and they see it as a burden.
JK: The friendship that you have with [your best friend] J is something that I've always admired because of the long-lasting nature of it, the many unconditional aspects of it, [and] the way that it rides through conflict. Sometimes when I think of care, I think of J just moving to whatever city you were gonna move to [for your PhD]. I think about the kind of commitments that we make for those of us that we love.
T: I think about that a lot too. That's ultimately my blueprint for everything, and I feel so lucky. Both of us have this experience of a true best friend, and also [get] to experience family in a different way through that relationship. It feels like a rare and precious thing.
I don't want this to come off as moralizing or prescriptive, like, “People need to share everything with everyone!”—but something that is particular about my friendship with J is that it's totally free of secrets. By secrets, I don't mean gossip, but aspects of our lives we hide because they are embarrassing or incriminating or whatever. I think most people are doing that kind of light policing of what they do or don’t say around different people. I have no shame with J, and it's because we've grown up together, and we've lived together, and we’ve truly seen the most humiliating aspects of one another. I have no fear of judgment. I feel that with my girlfriend now too, but it’s not something I have in most other relationships. I’m a very self-conscious person, and I’d like to work on that.
The other thing that I wanted to say was that, though I’m speaking from my own feelings of what feels right and what doesn’t, none of this is new. Many people have remarked on how the contemporary mental health crisis has emerged out of economic crisis, how this is one of the defining experiences of capitalist precarity in the imperial core, etc. If we accept that, then not only the therapy industry, but the whole imperative to ‘repair’ these ugly feelings is part of what’s allowing the system to continue functioning. It’s a crisis prevention mechanism. I think that people's discontent should be taken more seriously, not just as a psychological issue, but as a legitimate response to what is happening around them.
JK: I think a lot of things that feel really simple or straightforward when we speak about them are so hard to enact. These kinds of ugly feelings… Working in Palestine solidarity spaces, there's this question of ‘solidarity.’ The genocide is not happening to us. What does it mean to center yourself [or rather] what is centering yourself? What is solidarity? How do we talk about what we're doing and our experiences when we are only in solidarity and we absolutely are not the story?
Within the campus movement that has been taking place, everyone is so young. I was looking at this Instagram page a few months ago (that has since been taken down) called @userfemcel. It's this meme page on Instagram that is clearly made by, like, a 19 year old that was a part of the Columbia encampment. At first I was like, “This is pretty funny. This is relatable.” There was one meme that was like, When you see photos and videos of people at a protest getting beat up by the police and you get FOMO. But then, after a while, I was like, “I need to disengage, because this kid, the person behind this page, is so clearly 19.” There are things that I would disagree about, or [where] I would see them as immature about, but then in other ways, it hurts my heart so much that [they’re so young]. When I was 19 I was nowhere near any of these kinds of experiences.
T: I've definitely had that feeling too. It's good to remind myself that these people are really young and they're not going to have perfect politics. None of us do.
JK: We’re also really young.
T: That’s true. The sheer amount of responsibility they're juggling at 19 is worlds beyond what I was doing when I was that age. Maybe, hopefully, that means something. They will get older, and they will grow, and probably end up at a much more advanced place than we are now.
But I do worry about the ‘movement’ these days too. At least where I live, it feels like Palestine solidarity work is kind of seen as the vanguard of political action. That's been cool, because there's been a ‘change of guard,’ and there's been a change of tone. I think the new generation is much less invested in the state, less invested in respectability, less invested in institutions like the university [than other] recent movements have been. But there also is a kind of narrowness … What is seen as most useful is often direct action: the more scaled up and the more risky the direct action, the more useful.
What has been missing, I think, is serious base building. I worry about that. Some of it is coming, understandably, out of discontent with mass orgs that have turned towards electoral politics. But I worry about everything [to come in the future] emerging out of [this current] small group of 18-22 year olds who can be very insular—first because of repression and paranoia, and second due to a feeling of political righteousness. Instead of, “Thank you for coming to this meeting,” you hear, “You have no excuse for [not having come].” It’s combative. I feel like that becomes an issue for base building, especially for those who are uninitiated to the culture.
I've been reading all this classical Marxist theory because I've been in a Gramsci reading group this summer, and increasingly, I'm like, “Yeah, we need to build political parties.” That’s something that is totally lacking from the American left right now. There is no party structure, no mass organization. There's not even really much interest in doing that from a genuinely left position—[I’m] not talking about DSA-type politics. I don't think that people are really interested in taking power. If anything, people are [averse to the] idea of forming a social bloc that could take power. I’ve been thinking about this lately, reading Gramsci and Stuart Hall.
JK: I think that I might be one of those people on the left that doesn't currently have a desire to form a party. I don't know if you've heard, but there's going to be a new political party in the UK [with] Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, who quit the Labour Party over the Palestine Action proscription vote. [Sultana] has announced that there's going to be a new party, but all there has been so far is a newsletter signup or something. People have started calling it ‘Your Party.’ There's this excitement… Personally, it's not my priority to put my eggs in that basket right now, especially because it hasn't even launched yet.
When I heard you say a mass movement that will be able to actually take power, my first thought was, “That sounds exhausting…” It's interesting to notice myself feel that way!
At the same time, I've been saying that Maoism is coming back.
T: Yeah, totally.
JK: The [Maoist theory] that I know is from an art history perspective—Maoist art theory, and the ways in which Maoist China saw art and culture as not just a channel for the revolution. In terms of the artists and the writers, they have to ‘plunge into life,’ plunge into revolution, they have to go and live that life in order to truly assimilate what it means to be proletarian, and to then create work that doesn't just speak to and speak about revolutionary life, but that also will shape it in return. I also know [of Maoism as being] about voluntarism, that everyone, every single person, truly has to believe in the revolution. That [consciousness aspect] is interesting to me, in terms of base building, and in terms of what it actually means to get people to be interested or passionate about liberation.
I think that in the UK, the Palestine movement [has] a lot of liberal tendencies to it, especially in terms of what structures have existed [since] before 2023. [At the same time, the repression has been scary.] But when I read about the repression that has taken place in the past—the way that [activists and militants bave] been targeted by the state, it's like, “Well, none of this is new.” There's always ways to survive repression.
T: Some of what you’re saying makes me think: our understanding of parties has been so skewed by the major political parties in the West. For Gramsci, a party could never be formed from the top down; it arises ‘organically’ out of a social class or a set of classes. In that sense, a party is not something that can be willed into existence by this or that organization—it is the natural expression of class consciousness, of collective class consciousness. To have given up on that possibility before even starting is sad. The Left cannot subsist forever off of disruption.
We need a positive political vision. But for this to have any chance at moving out of the realm of fantasy, there also needs to be genuine mass organization, urgently. Right now, the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. is still a fringe movement. Some people feel justified in it being a fringe movement, or even proud of it. It can feel good to be in the outermost ring of opposition.
JK: Scale is scary, because [being] bigger implies the need to compromise.
T: One of the people who has been coming to the Gramsci reading group used to be very involved in the local chapter of PSL [Party for Socialism and Liberation]. Since then, PSL has been very much canceled for various reasons. But he told us that he left the group because he realized that no one was actually serious about what they were doing. He called it ‘LARPing communism.’ As in, people were having fun imagining themselves as figures from the Russian Revolution but no one was actually prepared to take the party seriously—it was just a bunch of college grads performing leftism. I think that can be hard to avoid. A few days ago, [you and I] were talking about [leftists in the US learning] how to use guns, and how that involves a kind of performance of militancy. I don't think it's something that can be avoided, necessarily, but it was interesting to hear him say that about PSL.
JK: What are some things that you're currently looking to learn or learn about?
T: Well, I'd like to continue with this reading group that my friends and I have been running. I want to read some Eastern Marxisms. Have you read Riot, Strike, Riot by Joshua Clover?
JK: No, not yet.
T: I want to learn more about different forms of resistance. I've been thinking about the strike and the riot and the occupation and the various other tactics we have at our disposal right now, and how those tactics change as the kind of society we live in changes. That's what’s occupying me intellectually.
And then, really, I want to be learning more skills. Maybe we were heading in the right direction with the free school. It's crazy how so many people living in the imperial core have been de-skilled through specialization and the outsourcing of reproductive labor. That's something that I've been working to remedy in small ways—like sewing a stuffed toy for my girlfriend, or going to the range with a friend. I think it’s important to learn how to use tools in order to better understand the systems we need to survive. What do you want to be learning?
JK: I want to learn more about how stuff works around my house. Concrete skills related to being alive. Being the rental generation means that [there’s so much] stuff that we just don't know about, because there's no reason for us to and, in fact, it's none of our business [because we don’t own the house]. I [do] want to get more handy. I also want to read more history. I want to know more about what people have been doing and been up to.
T: I really want more medical knowledge as well. I’ve just had a week full of doctor's appointments and vet appointments, and I’ve been thinking about how much knowledge is siloed within the medical establishment. It's incredible, how much doctors can tell you just by knowing what to look for, and having the right tools. And it’s sad to think that the current care shortage is artificially engineered in order to protect the elite status of the profession.
JK: I want to learn more how to take care of myself, and then, obviously, that will extend to how to take care of others, or help others take care of themselves.
Is there anything else that you would like to say or to ask me?
T: I don't think so.