💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › peter-gelderloos-other-worlds.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:17:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Other Worlds Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: late 2000's? Language: en Topics: family, intergenerationality, solidarity, Western civilization, freedom, apathy, the Real World Source: author; previously hosted at togettotheotherside.org/essays-and-short-stories/other-worlds/
I see the current unsustainability of the US anarchist movement, and its
exclusivity to the younger generation, as directly connected to our
general inability to talk about our struggle with our families. I know
people who are not afraid to go head to head with riot police or give
their hearts to a struggle they don't expect to win, who simply give up
when it comes to communicating their ideas, or even expressing honestly
who they are to their families. Family time for many is an odious
obligation in which they must place themselves in a box wholly alien to
them, silently accept the unfair interpretations others place on them
just to avoid an argument. Getting back to the real world that we create
with our friends is always a relief. And this fragmentation/evasion is
in turn directly connected to our general inability to communicate our
struggles to people who stand outside them.
For years I have been working on my relations with my family, not to
convert them but to win their support and understanding, so that I can
be me around them. This work has won me allies that have helped me
survive the repression and despair that accompany the struggle against
the state and capitalism. How much stronger would we anarchists be if we
always had our parents and grandparents there with us, instead of
fighting against us?
I'm luckier than many people in the understanding and sympathy I get
from my parents, although this good fortune is also the result of my
choice to fight for it going as far back as I can remember. There may be
a measure of truth in the proposition that parents only go conservative
in their old age if their children let them. The alienation between the
generations that marks the capitalist family deprives us of a balance
that might otherwise serve to radicalize the elderly and ground the
youth. In healthy, horizontal societies, the different generations can
learn from each other, but the nuclear family is structured to prevent
this (similar to how, in military and other academies, the different age
grades are strictly segregated to prevent them from building collective
knowledge that would challenge the control and one-way education of the
instructors).
If we can't overcome the alienation in our own families, what can we
accomplish? I recognize that there are many families that are far too
fucked to allow this kind of work, although I don't think I'm speaking
from a position of naiveté as dysfunction and abuse are no strangers in
my own family. The task of creating chosen families is important work.
But for many of us, we can learn how to pursue this revolution in the
families we are born into.
I spent years slowly accustoming my extended family to my radical ideas
and actions, and repairing the constructive damage I caused in my late
teen years by relentlessly calling out family members on what I saw as
their hypocrisy. I don't think I am giving myself too much credit to
believe certain political developments in my family at large were
provoked by my own actions and personal growth. After this many years of
work and growing together (I'm now in my mid-20s), I felt ready to send
them the following email, after a particularly intense experience in the
streets, which left me feeling perturbed because I assumed I could not
share it with them.
I want to share it with the wider anarchist community, with a few parts
edited for purposes of anonymity, in the hopes it would inform or
inspire similar efforts and provoke thought on the problem many of us
face in communicating our struggle to the family. One of the guiding
propositions of this letter is that most people do not believe things on
the basis of information, therefore the act of researching and arguing
has a strictly limited use in the anarchist project. Convincing people
to be anarchists, or active anti-authoritarians of whatever stripe, is
rarely one of these uses, because people do not commit themselves to a
fight on the basis of information or opinions. All the information
necessary to prove our basic premises is available, and these days even
easy to come by, but most people do not do this research because they do
not want the fundamental alienation, the chasm between what they want
and what they live, to be any more exposed than it already is. As social
beings, people attach more importance to Stories than to Information.
The state succeeds in part because it is able to present itself as the
Protagonist, thus people sympathize with the interests of the state
above their own interests. In a way, this is a mass Stockholm Syndrome,
sympathizing with our captors.
For this reason, it becomes necessary to work harder to protagonize
ourselves and communicate our struggles to those around us. Rebellions
succeed where there is a culture of rebellion, and creating this culture
despite the constant poison of pervasive commodity relationships is a
vital task for the revolution. The number of people who have an
anarchist family member is several times greater than the number of
anarchists, of course, and we have a greater chance of receiving the
attention and changing the culture of our relatives than the people in
the street, who generally hurry by without looking at our wheatpasted
posters or protest signs. Because subjective experiences, when presented
as such, are much harder for family members or people with some other
affective tie to dismiss, I rooted this letter to my family in my
personal experience.
I hope others find it useful...
---
Today I don't want to talk about politics. I want to talk about other
worlds.
One of the problems I have with democracy is that it forces everyone to
accept a single, objective world. But there are many worlds, and to a
certain extent it is our choice in which one we live. Certain
privileges—being white, being male, being well-to-do, being a citizen,
offer one more choice in worlds, but in the end I think we are the only
ones to determine in which world we live.
It's difficult living in a different world from people you love, and
even more difficult when your world has no room for existence, cannot
even be admitted as valid, in their world. I don't want to invalidate
any of your worlds. I'm learning to speak about my world, rather than
hiding it, even though hiding it makes it much easier to get along with
people in the Real World. Many other people who live in my world and
face this dissonance with their family simply give up on trying to be
understood. Visiting the folks becomes an insufferable duty, sitting
through constant judgment and pigeonholing, questions spoken and
unspoken “when will he find a career?” “when will he get married?”
Relatively speaking, I'm very lucky with my family, and I can thank all
of you that I can even begin to write this.
Recently the government tried to lock me up, and lots of you aided the
solidarity action or sent me words of love and support, and I
appreciated it immensely. Lots of friends came to the courthouse to be
there for us, people who have supported me throughout this period, who
have made survival possible and helped me turn survival into life,
people who didn't even know me when I was arrested. No one is alone, and
when we can fully realize this proposition we are strong enough for
anything. But pain as well as strength flows through networks of
affinity, and I worry about the effects of my life on those who love me
and support me but do not share my world. I know that when I am
threatened with prison time, it hurts some of you more than it hurts me
(perhaps to others it's simply bizarre or curious, depending on the
psychological distance), and I wonder, with nothing in your worlds, I
presume, to explain my actions, does your support come with a limited
patience, an expectation that in exchange one day I'll stop getting into
trouble?
But in my world the trouble never stops. This is because one of the
natural laws, a thermodynamic principle, even, of my world is that an
injury to one is an injury to all. One of the democratic laws of the
Real World is that “my freedom ends where that of another begins.” To
me, this is antithesis. Western civilization has never understood what
freedom is, in fact it is pathologically afraid of freedom, and to me
this is evident in its history of slavery, conquest, and political
rights. My freedom does not exist individually; it is something I create
with others. And I do not end where another begins. My self is not
confined to the biological limits of my physical body. I understand that
this type of individual exists in other worlds, and it is the Platonic
ideal of the Real World, but in my world the idea of truly separate
individuals is insane and naive. In my world, the human immune system is
collective property, as we all go sharing germs and antibodies and the
sickness of one affects all. In my world the trees are a part of my
respiratory system as much as my lungs are part of the forest. I don't
know how people in the Real World breathe, but in my world, someone who
destroys a forest is killing all the surrounding communities, and if
someone is trying to kill you, you have every reason to stop them by any
means necessary.
Because living is a choice in my world, my happiness is also a necessity
that I should fight for if I need to, and my happiness is largely built
up through relationships with other people. Anything that affects one of
them affects me. As long as I have friends who are locked up in cages, I
will not be free, because the only thing keeping me from getting my
friends out of those cages is the fact that there are guards with guns.
So in effect those guns are pointed at me and my friends. In the last
analysis, this is the only thing in the way of my happiness, my clean
air, my freedom. In other words, the people who live in my world are
fighting a war for their freedom, whereas in the Real World, there is no
war happening here, only far away on television. In other words,
according to the Real World, we're crazy (hence the reticence to talk
about our world with “normal people”).
Why is it this way? Objectively speaking, there are as many guns in our
world as in the other worlds, although I think people in my world are
much better informed about cops and private security and thus more
conscious of these guns in an objective sense. But people in other
worlds see police every day. If they benefit from white privilege and
class privilege, they probably do not feel that these guns are pointed
at them unless they have chosen to live in another world. And they
probably do not have any friends in prison. Why not? The populations
targeted by the prison system are segregated from our own (depending on
your choice of worlds maybe I'm one of the few people you know who have
been imprisoned; but in certain black neighborhoods of New York more
than one out of every 2 men younger than 30 has been kidnapped by the
prison system).
But why doesn't the realization that prison chooses people rather than
vice versa (a realization that is objectively undeniable) not make more
people choose to overcome that segregation? I don't know. Psychological
labels demonizing “criminals” play a part, even though we all know damn
well that our own communities and even families are so full of people
who have killed, raped, beaten, stolen, and broken tax laws that even
without personal experience on the inside no one can truly believe that
folks in prison are all that different from folks on the outside.
I think the reason is that people are scared. Many friends in prison
told me that so many people they knew just lost touch with them while
they were on the inside. It's a tremendous responsibility caring about
someone in prison because you want to free them and realizing that you
cannot free them shows you that you are not free yourself. It's hard
enough if they're just in there. It's harder if they're fighting to
retain their dignity, to organize with other prisoners, to challenge the
racism and abuse of the guards. In the case of this guy R, the guards
strapped him with a stun-belt provided to them by their
suit-and-tie-wearing friends in the state capitol (including people
y'all have voted for) and electrocuted him until he pissed blood.
In my world there exists the collective knowledge that prisons have
always been places of torture and murder and there has always been a
struggle to tear down every last prison. Someone who lacks this
knowledge, who lives in another world more like the Real World in which
“maltreatment” or “unfortunate incidents” like this are simply “isolated
cases,” could not make sense of the fact that their friend has been
electrocuted until he pissed blood, because they themselves are nothing
but an isolated case whose personal experiences are not granted any
legitimacy. So it's better only to have friends and loved ones who
inhabit the same world as you, because the psychological dissonance of
having friends in other worlds, given the emphasis of the Real World on
a false objectivity, is too much to bear. We also have our own
sheltering lies that would get shaken out of the tree in such a strong
wind, so we stay where it's safe. No friends in prison, no friends in
Palestine, no friends from the lower class (excepting employees we
pretend are our friends and their paid smiles can only confirm this
illusion). Don't find out what happens in the mines, in the poultry
factories, in the animal testing laboratories, in the child protective
services, in the refugee camps; it's better not to know.
The well fed people who see us going through the trash for our food
(there are more of us every day as the welfare rolls and unemployment
lines grow longer) – how I yearn to destroy their homes, their jobs,
their cars, so they could also understand what it is like to live in a
world in which there is plenty for everyone but They would rather throw
it away than share it with you. Those people already live in that world,
in fact, but they don't yet know it. Or maybe they do, and they clutch
their little parcel all the tighter, loath to share it, telling
themselves “it doesn't work that way.” But we just smirk because we know
better, and we know we are already richer than they will ever be.
The people who were watching the other night as the police beat us, I
wanted to reach out with my eyes and grab one of them, trade places with
her, not to escape the police, but to make her experience what I
experience, and see if she'd ever be able to explain it to her friends
and family. When you're in a crowd being beaten by the cops, if it's
your first time you begin to understand certain things about your
society maybe you could never see before. The first is the existence of
the crowd. The people around you are more a part of you than your
co-workers, your co-commuters, the co-spectators at a sports game or
movie have ever been. All the other limited ways your society permits
you to share space with other people are empty and disempowering next to
this crowd. It is familiar only to people who have been in combat, in a
natural disaster, in a riot.
The crowd has created itself; it was not mandated into existence by the
appropriate decision-making authority. A self-created being (whether a
crowd or an individual person) is sovereign. It experiences the kind of
freedom that you make with your own two hands, rather than the kind
someone permits you. This crowd gives itself permission to take over the
streets. The sidewalks are too small for crowds, no coincidence, and the
streets suit us. At a certain moment, the police attack. People in the
Real World will ask why, insist on some justification. The bystander who
I whisked in to take my spot will now understand that this is a stupid
question. The police, it becomes evident, are a rival gang,
automatically at odds with any self-creating crowd. Attacked by the
police enough times, our new friend will understand that the police
attack when they decide to. Sometimes there is a provocation normal
people will understand, other times no. But their attack has nothing to
do with responding to lawbreaking. It is evident that the entire crowd
is their enemy.
But it is also evident that the crowd is a single organism. If it were
just a collection of individuals, they would run and trample each other
when the police charged. But they believe in something that does not
exist in the Real World, call it solidarity, and they hold together,
responding as one. If you happen to be on the outside you must become
the shell of the organism, because you are closest to the police and
their clubs. You can see in their faces that the police hate you, that
they enjoy beating you. It is undeniable to anyone who has been there.
Have you ever seen old documentary footage from European countries in
the 60s, of police who had never ever had to beat someone with a
truncheon, suppressing their first protest? It's almost heart-breaking.
In the beginning, they give orders to disperse, they walk back and forth
confused when the protestors don't obey, they push and pull but to no
avail... They start to give little love taps with their batons. As the
orders keep coming down from on high they hit more and more,
increasingly unsettled. They'll give one person—no, not a person, a
dissident—a good thwack, and then turn away and walk somewhere else,
inefficient and distressed. But within an hour they are breaking heads
with hatred plain on their faces. They hate the dissidents for forcing
them to kill this innocence in themselves (if only they had obeyed, the
violence would be unnecessary!), but as cops (same goes with any other
type of functionary), they are too stupid to see that they have betrayed
themselves, they already gave up their humanity when they signed up to a
post where following orders was mandatory.
So, the cops are hitting you, and you must become hard. Your body will
not betray you, just try to take the club on the arm or the thigh, away
from the joint. You have enough adrenaline that you will not feel it.
Tomorrow you may not be able to walk but today you will be able to fight
hard and run fast. If they get you on the head and you fall, a hundred
hands will reach out from inside the crowd and pull you up. Someone
else, just a claw of this organism, will strike back, knock a pig over,
and more hands will reach forward and pull that person back to safety,
no one will be arrested. If the police do arrest anyone, that person
will be charged for whatever injuries any of the cops may have suffered.
Several cops will come forward to testify that they saw it happen. All
the police know and all the people in the crowd know that this is just a
game, part of a war that masquerades as a civil inquiry, that the judge
and everyone else must pretend to believe in. The legal charge is never
a response to crime. It is always a form of counterattack.
If the police manage to break the crowd, the organism splits into its
hundred cells, and each one will know what it is like to be hunted. The
Real World will temporarily be interrupted as shoppers and diners and
tourists see other human beings being chased and each one will be given
the brief choice—gawk or help shelter them. Now you're on the run. Now
you understand that the layout of your city, what seemed like a
convenient grid of streets, is a military formation, specially made for
trapping crowds. In the Real World this sounds like conspiracy theory
because we are trained to sneer at anything that hints of consistency or
dialectic, but unfortunately the police and city planners are not too
stupid to have studied history, and in our world we certainly remember
how many times we nearly took this city over and burned their fortresses
down, and how they rebuilt to give themselves the advantage next time.
We remember when the dumpsters were easily rolled into the streets and
set on fire, and how they replaced all the city’s dumpsters, in the
midst of a budget crisis no less, for new ones that could not be rolled.
We remember these streets when there were no security cameras, how they
talked about terrorism to justify the cameras but the people they put in
jail with them were some of us, just as we knew it would be.
Our new friend has good instincts, she doesn't go down the block that
gets sealed off, instead she hides for a while in a group of wealthy
diners, come out of their restaurant to watch the spectacle. She watches
vans of riot police tear around the streets, chasing people, pigs
leaping out and beating people down. It hurts her personally—minutes ago
they shared the same organism. But she can't let her rage show, not yet.
Face of bored curiosity. Blend in. After a few minutes she goes the
other way. She hears the helicopter in the sky and knows they are
looking for her and all her new friends. No one else even notices the
helicopter. They think they do not know what it is like to be spied on
from the sky, even though it happens to them almost every day. But they
pretend they have nothing to hide, no life that isn't skin deep. Ha! We
know what suppressed desires they bury deep down. They buy movies about
people who live like us. They cheat on spouses to feel a fraction of the
newness and risk and passion we make for ourselves every day.
All the fugitive cells are off running, trying to get someplace safe.
The police perimeter extends ten blocks in any direction, vans and cars
racing around, two helicopters passing overhead. The more experienced
ones know not to escape on the metro. They remember what happened a few
weeks ago, or earlier, the guy who went down and came up at his stop to
find a snatch squad waiting for him. There are cameras in the metro.
They make normal people feel safe, but we know they are pointed at us.
But we have brought extra clothes, in a dark corner or a McDonalds
bathroom or on a park bench people are pealing off outer layers and
changing their appearance, enough to slip out of the net. And if we
didn't before, now we know what it is like to live in a democracy and be
hunted. In the Warsaw ghetto, the hunted could count on help from the
majority of bystanders. In a democracy, you just get funny looks.
I'm tempted to say that the only people who truly understand democracy
are cops and criminals, but like I said I don't want to invalidate other
worlds. The politician making back room deals, jockeying along formal
and informal networks of power, and appeasing constituencies with
varying degrees of influence, is the only one to understand democracy
from a certain perspective; and the first-time voter, full of
excitement, solemnity, or hope, is privy to another unique vantage on
democracy. What bugs me is that this latter person has no idea that no
matter how she votes, someone's friend is still going to be in a prison
cell pissing blood.
The things I'm talking about are not exceptional. In my world they occur
all the time. This particular protest happened. It was a solidarity
march for the struggle taking place in Greece right now. There, at the
beginning of December, police shot and killed a 15-year-old in an
anarchist neighborhood. Thanks to cultural differences (the Greeks
liberated themselves from a dictatorship 30 years ago, which is
something the Americans haven't done in 250 years) the Greeks have not
yet conceded police the right to kill whenever they want, like police
are allowed to do in the US and most other countries. They also
understand that the police are not a random collection of individuals
but an institution created by and serving the powerful. They recognize
that it is never rich investors getting killed by police, only
immigrants and radicals. So, they responded appropriately, not
circulating a petition asking for this one cop to be fired, but by
attacking police stations and banks, and taking over TV and radio
stations to reclaim the power to explain themselves. Hundreds of
thousands of people have been participating, students, workers, older
generations, pouring out onto the streets. When the cops filled the air
with tear gas, they set fires to counteract the gas. If media in other
countries covered this at all, it was without context, without
understanding, only disjointed images of fires woven into a
prefabricated moralistic tale of Chaos. And around the world, people
have been attacking Greek consulates and banks, maybe in your city too.
Because in our world, an injury to one is an injury to all, and the
authorities who want our obedience are not about to stop killing us,
imprisoning us, and torturing us.
Around the same time cops in Greece killed that kid, cops in the US,
Georgia I think, shot another black boy to death. Folks in his
neighborhood did the honorable thing and rioted, but as far as I read
there weren't any other ripples in the whole country. Why not? People
don't seem to believe police should have a right to kill people, because
they lie to themselves and insist that police don't have that right,
they create a make believe world for themselves in which if someone,
anyone, commits a murder, he is punished. I don't think anyone actually
lives in the Real World-- it's too pathologically twisted and dishonest
a place and it would require so much psychological fragmentation and
displacement I think it would drive anyone insane. What I really want to
know is, what is the relationship of everyone else's world to the Real
World, and how do other people negotiate the inevitable contradictions?
How do other people explain how every day prisoners are being tortured
and cops are killing people, and why is this so underreported? What do
people see as their own role in this daily disaster? How can I build
bridges between my world and the worlds of other people who care, who
are sincere, who are trying, but who see the problems from another
perspective?
Thanks for reading my thoughts. I look forward to hearing your own.