I want to explore some thoughts around Margaret Killjoy’s well-known dictum “Deëscalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy,” Carl Schmitt and “The Concept of the Political,” constructions of opposition in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and the pragmatics of resistance in a time of fascism...but later on today, after coffee.
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OK, this is going to be a *very* long thread, for which I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ll repost it shortly, all in one place, where you can consider and weigh what I’m trying to get at more organically, but I want to lay this all out here first. Here we go:
I get, firstly, that people’s lives are on the line, and may therefore be in no mood to entertain what might on the surface seem to be a semantic quibble. Let me say, then, that I don’t think what I am about to propose is any such thing, but rather the result of some careful thinking on my part about the pragmatics of resistance to oppression.
Let me also make it explicit that Margaret is someone I hold in an enormous amount of respect. She’s an anarchist, a writer of science fiction, a founder of the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl, and an indefatigable supporter of self-organized mutual aid efforts, which means I vibe with her in a number of reasonably unusual ways from the get-go. None of what I’m about to say should be construed as in any way a criticism of her or her positions.
In her own words, Margaret is “probably best known” for the injunction against punching left — and, more broadly, against the schism & drama that so often cleave left communities, burning their energy & depriving them of effective power — that’s expressed in her dictum “Deëscalate all conflict that’s not with the enemy.”
When I first encountered this framing, I recognized Margaret’s intention instantly, and I’m pretty sure anyone who’s ever spent much time in left spaces will too.
(There’s a reason that post did numbers, right? Left beef is exhausting.) A circumstance writers may be familiar with, though, is that the moment you succeed in expressing some complex understanding of the world with sufficient compactness and elegance for it to go viral, you realize that very compactness entails the risk of misrepresentation. The very nature of an aphorism of this sort tends to militate against nuance. And so it has been for Margaret here, as regards the word/concept “enemy.”
Not long ago she returned to “deëscalate,” in an attempt to work through some of the tangles it had occasioned. With apologies for the Substack link, here’s that thinking: https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/we-know-who-our-enemies-are
For Margaret in 2025, “anyone who wields the power of the state to destroy people’s lives is the enemy.” But there’s room for nuance in the notion that this “anyone” is not identical with the power they wield, which may be an accident of history:
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