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+Title: Labels are language
+Category: Blog
+Date: 2019-09-20 15:38
+Tags: politics
+
+
+A phrase that I've heard way too fucking often recently (this edition
+will contain swearing and might not be suitable for children of ages
+below `NaN`) is "I don't care about labels, I want to do politics!"
+
+As one might expect, this sentiment often comes from centrists. But
+more often than not, it comes from fellow leftists. People who are
+otherwise somewhat radical in their approach of the world, people who
+think capitalism's gotta go and (sometimes) that states and borders
+are bad. And it's a stance that has confused me, and keeps confusing
+me and which is why I'm now writing a blog post about it because
+apparently that's what I do.
+
+The problem I have with "I don't care about labels" is that it's
+analogous to "I don't care about language".
+
+Labels are a linguistic tool to talk about `$stuff` without having to
+build up an entire language from first principles in every
+sentence. Labels are very useful for general conversation about
+things, like "what is a table?", "what is a train?", "what is art?",
+etc.
+
+When we look at the definition of labels, there's usually three
+kinds. There's labels for **natural things, with natural
+definitions**, such as the definition of a prime number. These are
+farely rare. Neither the definition of prime numbers, nor prime
+numbers themselves are going to change due to cultural context.
+
+Secondly, you have labels that refer to **natural things, with
+cultural definitions**. These are things like planets, mountains or
+rain. Definitions can change and they're also subject to cultural
+differences. What you and I consider "rain" will most likely depend on
+where we grew up, if there was frequent rain at all, etc.
+
+The last category are **cultural things, with cultural definitions**,
+such as art, sub-categories of it (movies, games, etc), as well as any
+identity label. Calling myself an anarchist doesn't naturally depend
+on anarchy as a concept occuring in nature, nor can I define it just
+by pointing at other properties of natural definitions. Rather, I need
+to pre-define a whole bunch of cultural context, for you to be able to
+understand why I am an anarchist and what that means.
+
+**And that's the fucking job of labels!** We can't have the same 5
+conversations over and over again and we can't rely on the trust that
+people around us are always gonna be on our side. We should have
+conversations from time to time about what these labels mean to us,
+especially when it becomes clear that there's miscommunication. 
+
+But also, just because we're having a conversation about labels,
+doesn't mean we need to start bikeshedding their definitions and scope
+(whether it be anarchy, libertarian socialist, libertarian
+communists - these are all kind of similar enough to work with). Their
+context is still there to be used.
+
+That doesn't mean that I am okay with any vaguely leftist label. I
+have, over the last year or so, become more sceptical of communism,
+talking about how you want to guillotine people and similar. Being an
+anarchist means being opposed to state violence, no matter who's state
+it is. But this isn't a conversation that is easy to have if I don't
+already know a bunch of labels and can refer back to them. Furthermore,
+maybe I don't _want_ to have this conversation in certain situations
+so why would I have to engage with tankies when I don't want to?
+
+Most of the time the people who say "I don't care about labels, I
+wanna do poltics", never do any politics due to lack of a platform or
+language to engage with similarly minded people about strategy.
+That's because political action depends on the people doing it having
+some understanding of the work they're doing, how it relates to others
+and themselves. There's a reason why minority groups rely on labels
+(such as people in the LGBTQ community), and they serve an important
+role in our discourse.
+
+This is not to say that we should try to make the onboarding easier
+and use less jargon language when dealing with outsiders. Making
+people more sympathetic to the radical left is important, albeit not a
+job everybody might want to do.
+
+Still...I feel labels are important, especially when we deal with
+internal discourse. For the sake of the conversation, and everybody
+involved in it.