What does personal responsibility mean in the Left?

Back online in 2012—a different geological era as far as internet discourse goes, and a time when reposting Zizek content wasn’t cringe—this video of his cropped up a lot in my circles. At the time, liberals kept telling everyone to buy Fair Trade or charitable products, that conscious and ethical consumption patterns would trigger more ethical business practices at the production end. Zizek’s talk was part of the counter-argument that all our consumption choices are, one way or another, constrained by the way capitalism operates, and that you have to change the whole system for any individual to be able to make truly ethical choices.

In 2024, the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument has extended far beyond the fact that not all of us can easily buy organic carrots. These days it’s trotted out to justify things like buying the Hogwarts Legacy game, despite knowing that J.K. Rowling will use a portion of those funds to torment trans people. Or if your day job is working for a weapons manufacturing company, but you’re also trans and popular among twee nerds, people will come in to defend your actions as something anyone would do to survive under capitalism. In this framework, capitalism becomes synonymous with things that feel bad, so things that bring comfort—collecting your paycheck from the murder factory, indirectly financing transphobes, streaming Disney Plus all day—are good and fine. If there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, no one can be held responsible for anything they do at any time.

We all know this is a problem, of course. We’re not liberals. The radical Left keeps abreast of the discourses and condemns the excuses people make for anti-social behaviour. But we’re not always good at seeing when we’re falling into these traps ourselves. One of the weird things about the Left is how we emphasise collective action and social connection and how important every person is, but have ceded the idea of personal responsibility almost entirely to the Right.

It’s strange, because even under full communism or whatever we’d still be individuals, and problems would still exist that required personal action. I suppose without the current structural constraints—landlords, exorbitant grocery prices, the drudgery of most workplaces—it might be easier to make personal adjustments. But it seems unlikely that a) we could get to any utopia without making personal changes and b) that if we somehow managed that, we could then just flip the switch and automatically form better personal habits.

We’re right to scoff at the idea that we can shorter-showers our way out of climate change, but…well, it’s not like we won’t have to eventually take shorter showers. (My sense that fully automated luxury space communism was a colonial fantasy, divorced from the realities of resource extraction, was confirmed when I found out the ‘space’ part meant mining asteroids.) Moreover, since most of us aren’t involved in collective climate activism, it’s questionable what purpose this scoffing serves. Saying knowledgeably that “the problem is structural” often means no more than “someone else should deal with it.”

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This is the point where I bring up Covid, which I delayed because I know a lot of people will rapidly look away, the same way I rapidly skip over articles about the ice caps melting or the sea being on fire. Rest assured, I’m not about to list case numbers or the specific manifestation of the disease; I don’t think details always help people engage with an issue. The only literature on climate change I touch is stuff like How to Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm; something that will convincingly show me what systemic action I can take.

When it comes to Covid, most people don’t really know what collective action looks like beyond vaccination, even though we all know that isn’t enough. I’ve recently fixated on air filtration; making sure everyone breathes in clean air would not only help against Covid, but a whole host of other diseases, excess CO2 intake, humidity, air pollution, wildfire smoke and so on. It’s my hope that at some point people will look back on our current dirty air habits in the same way we look back on societies who hadn’t developed or propagated clean drinking water. As this article says, clean air is the new frontier of public health, and it’s exciting to know that there’s a way to make a real difference.

It’s sometimes hard to work out how systemic change works, because people think it either looks like patiently lobbying MPs (liberals) or razing Parliament to the ground (radicals). The first position cedes decision-making to people who are uninterested in or hostile to progressive change, while the second doesn’t usually have a strategic method to get from where we are now to storming the Beehive. I’m inclined to think that systemic action usually means ignoring government altogether and doing whatever it is yourselves. This doesn’t always mean illegal stuff either; when it comes to air filtration, it’s probably most effective to have conversations with your local café workers, teachers, gym workers, doctors, librarians, office mates—basically anyone who spends a substantial amount of time indoors—and convince them to club together some money to buy an air purifier for their building (and/or to make one themselves; DIY Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are highly effective). Sure, it’s not a complete overhaul of the system, but it’s also a concrete win with demonstrable collective gains.

In the coming year, I’m planning to become the weird air purifier person at parties and community meetings, bringing along a Corsi-Rosenthal box and encouraging everyone around me to do the same. But in the long term, air purifiers are still not a magic bullet against making personal changes. Aside from them being 75-80% effective for Covid, there’s the problem that most modern technology is built in ways that are environmentally unsustainable. Some air purifiers are greener than others, but unless we develop the capacity to produce home-grown long-lasting organic recyclable filters en masse—not impossible, but difficult without intense pressure—we’ll still probably also have to get used to opening the windows a lot more. I’m sure there are ways to alter buildings to provide built-in ventilation, but we need ways to cope with our current buildings in the here and now.

One of the problems with radical leftism is that while it often accurately states the depth of a problem and the utopic end goals we should have, it’s not always great at responding to what’s happening in the moment. When Convoy 2022 was happening, a lot of people blathered about how we need to improve structural inequities and reform our education systems—true enough, but that didn’t provide any answer for what to do, in the moment, about a superspreader event of cookers helping Nazis build their movements in real time and making Thorndon uninhabitable. For Covid, of course we need better vaccination and air filtration, but in the situation we have right now, masking up remains the best defence. Yet political affiliation is seemingly no predictor for this, because most of the Left no longer do it, despite the myriad general and specific advantages for us in keeping it up.

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In After the Party, Penny alienates her entire community with her obsession over bringing her paedophilic ex-husband to justice. Having obsessed over stopping a serial abuser myself, I deeply understand the incredulous rage when being completely right about something bad has little to no bearing on the situation. But the unfortunate fact is that other people’s trauma is boring. It’s frustrating and tedious to watch someone return to the same point of grief again and again, no matter how justified it is. Many people have found that constantly yelling about being in a pandemic tends to alienate rather than convince others, and frequently retreat to sympathetic online spaces where their legitimate anger and sense of betrayal is at risk of being warped by a hefty dose of internet poisoning. To avoid this, we need to keep trusting that most people aren’t trying to be selfish cunts, and that there are still ways to reach them about Covid precautions. Believing in people’s goodwill and capacity for change is basically the leftist project at its core.

Yet all the onus here has fallen on the Covid cautious, and none on everyone who abandons all precautions even in low-effort scenarios. It’s now seen as overbearing to ‘request’ that people wear a mask, let alone demand; you have to ‘encourage’ people, even though we know everyone comfortably ignores such a weak appeal. Mask advocates in 2024 are made to feel like we’re infringing on other people’s autonomy, and that no one should be pressured to wear a mask if they’re uncomfortable about it. Remember when the far right took this stance in 2020, and we all recognised them as arseholes misusing social justice rhetoric to legitimise harming their community? And now they’ve effectively won the discourse across the board.

Is it too much to ask that people harden up in response to a little hectoring for not wearing a fucking mask, even for short public transport journeys where one in seven breaths is not your own? It’s hard continually trying to appeal to people’s sense of community, or to act as if every non-masker is a tender naïf who’s totally eager to protect disabled people but has to be gently coaxed into doing the right thing. Non-maskers often retreat into fragility when confronted about their behaviour—suddenly remembering all their various problems which make it too hard to mask on top of it all—but as an emotional response it’s perhaps more akin to white fragility, masculine fragility and so on. Abled fragility, I guess. It’s not the real fragility of the immunocompromised people who haven’t been able to socialise indoors for years on end. We can’t keep asking them to be nice to us; it’s not fair and I’m not even sure it’s effective.

Surviving under capitalism also means resisting its imperatives towards selfishness, greed and indifference to others' needs. Capitalism wants everyone to give up thinking about Covid, to veil the trauma of mass death and lockdowns and carry on pumping out cash for landlords and supermarket owners to guzzle. In such a miserable environment of pointless suffering, I get that it’s hard to add in suffering that has a useful purpose. I’m not a perfect masker myself, and for my sins I’ve still gone to indoor restaurants in the past two years. But I will say that if you’re not wearing a mask on a bus across town—the lowest-effort masking in one of the highest-risk environments—you are being an arsehole. I can’t say it differently. We can’t sell utopian socialism on a dour promise of communal gruel pots and endless struggle sessions, but we also can’t sell it on a promise of infinite luxury goods and never having to think about anything.

We are constantly grieving our whole society, including our Covid response. As Themme Fatale said on TikTok, none of us wanted a world without material supports for Covid sufferers where we all keep infecting each other ad infinitum, but we’re staying stuck in the denial stage of grief and engaging in unhealthy behaviour as a result. I’m trying to move in towards anger and sadness, and of course I’m angry and sad at the sixth Labour government and the current far right nightmare, but truth be told I’m also upset with people I know and love who aren’t trying. I’ll keep loving them and pushing for systemic change so not everyone has to focus on Covid, but as Themme Fatale said, we all need to sit down and have a big fucking sook about how it all went wrong. And then get ready for the work we have to do.

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Ari Wilson is an activist and writer based in Aotearoa. Check out their Substack for their quest to watch every Sam Neill film in existence.