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Title: Navigating Despair Author: Subversive.Thread Date: December 8th, 2019 Language: en Topics: mental health, praxis Source: https://classtrouble.club/blogs/resonance-archives/navigating-despair-parts-i-ii-iii
Too often we come home demoralized by the oppression we see every day.
We want to do more to fight back against the inertia that allows
oppression to exist. Sometimes we are able to do more — often we’re not.
In this three part series we want to explore what it means to constantly
come up against our capacity. We want to expand on how positioning
oppression as something individuals can or should dismantle alone is a
trap wielded to maintain the violence we resist. We want to identify how
our willingness to make a difference in the world is used to beat us
into submission by constantly refunneling our energy into hierarchies
that don’t deviate from the status quo but rather reinforce it. And
finally, we want to share how we’ve navigated the sadness we’ve felt
both inside and outside movement spaces, and share some lessons we are
carrying forward.
choices is more than we could ever process — emotionally, physically,
financially?
colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy seem unstoppable?
as far as our own bodies can take us?
Every day we see more hungry people than we can possibly feed by
ourselves, more unsheltered people than we can house, and more pain and
suffering than we can process. Yet we see stores full of food, buildings
that could provide shelter, and thousands of people who could be
building a world where we collectively support each other rather than
existing as cogs in a machine that forces us to compete for our most
basic needs. Most days we are left wondering “What more could we do, as
individuals navigating our daily lives, to disrupt the inertia of
oppression?”
In this series we want to explore how positioning oppression as
something individuals can or should dismantle alone is a trap wielded to
maintain the violence we resist. We want to identify how our willingness
to make a difference in the world has been coerced and coached into
substituting individual choice for collective action. And we want to
name the different structures that co-opt our efforts at resistance for
their own benefit, producing the despair so many of us are navigating.
Our hope is that by sharing our experiences we can unearth the shame we
feel when we cannot do enough, and reposition those feelings as a call
for collective care and mutual investment.
To be clear, asking ourselves what we can do to dismantle oppression
isn’t a bad thing. It’s foundational to our struggle. It’s how we get
moving, by starting with ourselves. But we have been conditioned by
white settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalist individualism to
believe that isolated choices can be powerful political acts when
oftentimes they’re not. Going vegan in itself won’t end white supremacy
or capitalism. Buying an electric car won’t either. Donating to charity
won’t end poverty. Volunteering for or working at a nonprofit won’t
eradicate oppression — in fact, nonprofits were designed to perpetuate
the status quo. And neither voting nor policy change will ever uproot
the carceral state. None of these tools were meant to end oppression,
and many of them were always meant to disarm and neutralize radical
movements.
When we buy into the narrative that individuals and their choices are
the primary drivers of systemic change, it becomes easy to agree with
the conclusion that we are personally responsible for dismantling
hierarchies of oppression. And that if we fail, we have ourselves to
blame. But our oppressors know that individual acts of resistance cannot
stop them, so they use our will to fight back against us. Like a hamster
wheel built to extract and expend all our energy and resources, they
isolate our actions and contain their effects by filtering them through
violent hierarchies — e.g., electoral politics, the nonprofit industrial
complex, the colonizers’ education systems — so that our overall impact
never seriously threatens the status quo.
Radical movements are never meant to get outside of the wheel, or they
must always be moved into it.
If you are thinking that individual choices like adopting a plant-based
diet or voting are meant to be aggregated together to affect systemic
change, we remind you: Veganism and vegetarianism, at least in a Western
context, are rife with classism and white supremacy. From the smug
victim-blaming of affluent people about poor peoples’ food choices to
the working conditions that poor people of color endure globally which
scaffold “conscious” consumer choices, capitalism is alive and well.
Similar can be said of voting. If every person in their respective
countries voted we would still live in a world built on borders
delineated through the violence of white settler colonialism.
When we understand the magnitude of capitalism, white supremacy,
anti-blackness, patriarchy, climate change, and other violent
hierarchies, we are meant to feel demoralized. Settler colonialism’s
foundation rests on its ability to disconnect us from each other, from
our land and our homes, from nature, and from any sense of community.
Its power grows with its ability to constantly reconstruct the world to
obstruct individual acts of resistance. When we are made to believe that
the responsibility of destroying oppression sits on our shoulders alone,
we are not meant to feel empowered, we are meant to feel so totally
ill-equipped that the thought of resisting feels overwhelming and
foolish.
Over time, we become disheartened and disillusioned — we burn out. And
that was always the point. Whether resistance is immediately overwhelmed
by the magnitude of oppression or is snuffed out over time through the
bureaucracy of empire, those holding power want us to feel a greater
sense of despair than any sense of resistance or interconnected struggle
that can be cultivated and grown.
Our despair then is an understandable response to the magnitude of
oppression we experience every day. But it is also a call to action to
build movements that are greater and more resilient than our individual
selves.
“To me the important thing is not to offer any s hope of betterment but,
by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge
my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of
thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is
that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue
unquestioned. The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who
profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the
way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” — Ursula
K. Le Guin
In Part One of “Navigating Despair” we focused on naming the trap of
individualism and how, as a vehicle used to replicate oppression, it
produces chronic burnout and despair. In Part Two we set out to share
some of our experiences while organizing within hierarchies that
reproduce the oppression we hoped to fight and how those experiences
have reshaped our approach to movement work. In Part Three we will share
some lessons we’ve learned when navigating despair and how we hope to
build by investing our time, energy, and material resources in what we
believe are the types of world-making that are best positioned to bring
joy to ourselves and those we love.
that dream is always moved further into the future?
if we consistently and predictably agree to follow?
things that keep us from getting free, that keep us from dreaming up new
ways of pursuing and realizing liberation?
Before we engaged in autonomous organizing, some of us organized in
elections. But when we grew to understand the corruption,
unaccountability, and political opportunism of the electoral process, we
grew disgusted with it. We felt power must be situated closer to people
engaged in struggle, so we sought out grassroots organizing. Instead, we
found leftist vanguards who were only interested in our liberation
insofar as it served their ambitions to capture state or colonial power
for themselves. We felt how disempowering it is to be directed by the
vanguard’s “leadership” on when, how, and who we were to organize with,
and at what pace. We realized this wasn’t the liberation we were
fighting for either — it wasn’t liberation at all but rather a trade for
a different management class just as willing to exploit us as the old.
At the same time, many of us worked in nonprofits that, at face value,
purported to be working to “end the cycle of poverty.” Yet direct
service staff like us were paid poverty-level wages while “founders” and
administrators were paid far more; our passion for equity and justice
was leveraged to coerce and guilt-trip us into giving more of ourselves
than what was sustainable; and we were set up with unreasonable
expectations for what an individual could accomplish from the start.
In each of these instances — elections, vanguards, and nonprofits — we
kept coming back to the same questions: What was similar about these
organizational models? And why did we feel so disempowered, tired, and
sad while navigating them?
The politician, the vanguard, and the non-profit all seek to house the
struggle within their own vision for the future. The logic goes: if a
house must have an owner, then a movement must have a leader. Of course,
in building their future we are often asked to be the fodder “for the
cause.” After many years, we began to see the most common and visible
forms of organizing operate as top-down models obsessed with reaching
scale (spreading to as many people as possible). But when scale becomes
the central point of organizing, it also asks us to neglect our own
needs and capacity, and to enforce hierarchies that separate ourselves
from other people engaged in struggle.
We found ourselves chronically tired and sad because no matter what we
did, it would never be enough to reach the scale we were told we needed.
We would burn out because we weren’t organizing in a way that included
our own needs. And ultimately, we weren’t organizing for our own
liberation, or the liberation of anybody we knew and loved. We were
sacrificing ourselves on the behalf of the mythic and monolithic
“masses,” someone else’s strict definition of revolution, some leader’s
idea of the “real work” which always managed to deprioritize our own
needs or silence our asks for support. For us, this needed to change.
But before we could change how we wanted to organize, we had to change
how we thought about the future. We had to learn to be open to
possibilities that weren’t pre-drawn by the carceral state, the
nonprofit industrial complex, or the colonial imagination. We had to
interrogate our own politics around scale and revolution. We had to
problematize what it meant to organize outside hierarchy and to center
all of the ways in which we, and everyone we love, have endured so much
pain.
We recognize now that the separation between ourselves and the people
who we are working to uplift is arbitrary, if not nonexistent. We were
(and are) people in struggle. We were (and are) living in housing and
healthcare precarity. We were (and are) who we are fighting to liberate
because we were (and are) the oppressed.
“I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that
gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them. I’ve gone through
phases of “sad politics” myself and I’ve learned to identify the
mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the
tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so
that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.” — Silvia
Federici
It feels fitting to post Part Three of “Navigating Despair” today as
some of us have taken time to create space from wage-labor and unpaid
work. Yet, as we travel this week, the work of processing our burnout,
our sadness, and our anxiety is still itself work. In Part Three we
wanted to share some lessons we’ve learned in helping make the space
in-between the sprints we find ourselves compelled to run a little more
possible — and, we hope, a step closer to something that feels a little
more sustainable.
These lessons are guidelines — not rules. They may speak to you. They
may not. We have never wanted to make proclamations about what will work
in all movement spaces for all movement builders. As autonomists and
anarchists, that immediately introduces hierarchy into organizing our
spaces. It goes against everything we’ve fought to build, and everything
we believe. So read these. Share them. We hope you find resonance in
them.
individuals engaged in collective struggle?
a liveable life?
fighting for?
When people learn about our politics as autonomists, we are often asked
“So what do we do?” Sometimes this question is asked in bad faith by
people who know that it’s impossible to give a complete answer. They are
often coming from a place that has already mapped out success or failure
based on how well our answer aligns with how they think change should
happen. They are already firmly attached to one future, not the
possibility of liberation through many.
In other situations, we know that this question comes from a place of
despair: What more can we give when we’ve already sacrificed so much?
We want to avoid prescribing any simple solutions when it comes to
resistance: We aren’t leaders, nor are we oracles of the future. What we
can offer here are the lessons we’ve learned so far.
building what we can now.There are no one-size-fits-all “solutions” for
the future which do not foreclose on the possibility of liberation by
shackling it to hierarchy. We have to challenge ourselves to think about
the future as a way of aspiring toward possibilities rather than feeling
attached to the “successes” or failures of systems and institutions that
we didn’t create and that don’t seek our liberation. For us, we began to
ask “What if pockets of the future already exist alongside the present?
What if people have been organizing autonomously already? Could we
connect with them? Is there a history of autonomous organizing? What if
our future depends less on something distant and more on how well we are
cultivating what exists in the margins where we live?”
to organize around what brings us joy.All capitalist institutions are
inherently ableist. By extension, organizing spaces that haven’t
divested from a capitalist work ethic make sustainable organizing
impossible. They set expectations that produce burnout and replicate the
same exploitation they say they want to destroy. If we begin to see
ourselves not as disposable objects to be used up in the struggle for
liberation but as people worthy of liberation too, then it becomes
rational to say no to the types of organizing that constantly ask us to
martyr ourselves. All liberatory struggles are struggles for life, joy,
and connection — not despair and not death.
grieve, and to heal.Our bodies hold the collective wisdom of our
ancestors. We can begin disrupting the ableism of settler colonialism,
white supremacy, and patriarchy by listening to them. When we are
feeling alienated, our bodies are telling us that building community is
vital to our individual and collective survival. When we are burned out,
our bodies are telling us that there is more work to do than can we
possibly do alone. And when we want to give up, our bodies are
communicating a need to rest that doubles as a reminder that we need
communities in struggle that can step up when we need to step back and
heal.
individuals.No matter what we do, there will usually be more than one
right choice to make — and as individuals we cannot make them all. One
person didn’t create the oppression we are fighting, so we shouldn’t
expect an individual to end it either. When we expect too much from
ourselves or our small communities of resistance, we replicate the
oppressor’s world for them by replicating the ableism that fuels it. If
we feel small or alone, it is not a testament to our inability to make a
difference as individuals — it is a testament to the need for community
and connection, to build the places where we can realize our full
potential as communities in struggle together.
affinity with and who understand your needs.We’ve been told that it’s
our task as radicals to “radicalize the people” too — without much
regard for our own mental health and capacity. But there are no truly
safe spaces in a world of hierarchy and domination. The large majority
of our time is navigating, interacting with, and finding small ways to
push back against people with harmful perspectives. Family, co-workers,
people on the street — most of these people have perspectives that are
opposed to ours, that are hurting us. But we’re forced to engage with
many of these people because the alternative is to be punished, to lose
our livelihood, to be outed and targeted. We’re always already doing the
work because we have no choice.
How does creating boundaries not make sense for our safety and sanity?
What’s wrong with being very intentional and deliberate with the people
we actually want to build with — who want to build with us, who honor
our time and our full selves? What’s wrong with building between people
who actually bring meaning to our lives and who spending time with is
generative rather than depleting?
These are the people who have shown us that mutual compassion is the
most sustainable form of resistance, and that we do not need to
“convince the masses” or sacrifice ourselves to create substantive
change.
In what we build with each other we are demonstrating that a better
world is not only possible, it’s happening.