💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › daniel-baryon-hope.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:59:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Hope Author: Anark Date: 6/15/2021 Language: en Topics: hope, realism, optimism, pessimism, futurity, anarcho-nihilism, praxis, Breadtube Source: Author script
The following is the script of the video I published on my channel
Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here:
https://youtu.be/yBRTm1tMdAw
Minor edits have been made to the script to instead refer to itself as
an essay instead of a video. Other than this, the content has remained
the same and may be seen as a copy of the video, in text form, that can
be distributed wholly in place of the video.
Solidarity forever.
As I write these words, great, black clouds billow forth from the fires
of human domination, drifting now overhead, they seem to block out the
sun. We look to the sky and think we remember a time when it was blue;
when the light at least shone through between the great storms and we
ask: was it a memory or the dream of a hopeless people? Will we ever
outlive the damage that is being done? Can the fires ever truly be
quenched?
Not knowing the answers, many give in to the justifying philosophies
which underpin hierarchical society; after all, a truly enormous
propaganda machine is in place to take advantage of the mental
exhaustion of the impoverished and to counsel them toward acceptance of
a system which functions upon their exploitation. And it has succeeded
magnificently at this goal. As it has been said “it is easier to imagine
an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
Yet the machine’s manufactured consent is weakening, or should we say,
it is becoming untenable. It is bare upon its face that the system is
degrading around us. It seems even to those who have doubted for long
eras, that the death machine is accelerating toward a disaster which
affects the lives of everyone we know and love. For others, it is easier
to grab on to the optimistic fantasy of a subjugated people; that the
drivers of this great machine will simply steer away.
But both of these impulses represent the rejection of a grounded
realism. Just as we cannot fall for the naive belief that a utopia
awaits within our certain future, we cannot simply give in to the
doomsday prophets. Not only because it does not serve us, as we shall
soon demonstrate, but because it is not within our species to accept a
final defeat. As Ernst Bloch says in his work The Principle of Hope: “as
long as man is in a bad way, both private and public existence are
pervaded by daydreams; dreams of a better life than that which has so
far been given him.”[1] He, like us, does not speak of a wayward
daydream which idly envisions a reality that can never be solidified.
This notion, of conceiving a future project which negates our current
suffering, is both practical and necessary. Further, it is the organic
impulse of all oppressed peoples, even though they may be thoroughly
deluded from this recognition.
Yet, to those crushed by the manufactured realism of hierarchical
society, any conception which emphasizes the possibility of success can
almost seem absurd. Just as within a great darkness, one who was dwelled
there for a long era may forget the light, it becomes easier not to
remember what sight once offered and to give in to blindness. But in
this essay I would like to remind you of a light outside the darkness of
our narrow account. More than this, I would like to tell you why the
only path which can lead us from the darkness is...hope.
Humanity is a most peculiar species. Our minds, the most advanced
cognitive machines ever uncovered, are able to conceive of ideas far
beyond all precedent or rationality, yet are, tragically, limited in
their ability to enact those ideas by the burdens of a physical world.
We can conceive of being disembodied minds, existing prior to physical
things, but the moment that our brains are mutilated or destroyed, so
too are our minds. We can conceive of a transcendent psyche which
endures after death, disentangled with the physical realm, but one day,
we will nevertheless meet with our end.
Similarly, although we can mentally conceive of the future, we are bound
to perceive an eternal present, our minds acting like a spotlight on the
ever-moving slideshow of life.
But this last antagonism cannot be simply dismissed as a philosophical
oddity. One cannot live their life narrowly preoccupied upon a mental
present, even if they are inexorably tied to it. The present configures
an eternal trail of past moments once in flux, continually written into
granite and it proceeds through an inevitable future, which appears
before us undecided, within its great potentiality the arc of all things
terrible and terrific. As beings which must act perpetually without
foreknowledge, we are then constantly bound to the process of
forecasting the future. To do anything, one must think of a future
moment wherein that action has come to fruition. And this process of
constantly being-without-conclusion, can lead to an overwhelming sense
of distress and anxiety. In absence of some method of determining our
future, every moment to come is an ineffable void.
How well we forecast these future moments then comes to determine much
happiness and suffering we experience throughout our lives. If we form
poor understandings of the world, if we give in to delusion, or if we
simply divest ourselves of the responsibility of interpretation and
action, we will continually fall short of our desires, and this will
inevitably create misery. We are, in every moment, locked into a cycle
of future anticipation. This is what Ernst Bloch means when he says:
“Primarily, everybody lives in the future, because they strive, past
things only come later, and as yet genuine present is almost never there
at all.”
Each human, bound by this inherent futureness, is then also inevitably
bound to form a set of expectations, based on precedents and desires, a
perspective on how they view the possible resolution of events to come.
But those who seek to determine this inevitable tide of future events
most accurately must invest the time that is needed to understand the
world, to quantify its many intricacies and to work out the complex
interconnections. And this process can be very mentally draining. The
world, after all, is far too complicated for our minds to ever truly
grasp and all of our attempts are doomed to a small sampling of an
almost impossibly vast dataset, no matter how well adjusted.
With this in mind, under a capitalistic paradigm in which the lives of
the masses are increasingly filled with frivolous, unfulfilling,
alienated work, in which we are more and more atomized from our
communities and our peers, driven into both physical and mental
exhaustion just to stay afloat, the desire to have one’s expectations
settled, is in high demand. Without the time nor mental energy to really
pursue what appears to be a byzantine maze of philosophy and political
theory, it is only natural that many will seek an escape from the burden
of constant measured prediction and action, of dealing with mistakes of
understanding, and of correcting their mental framework such that they
may succeed where they have failed before. It is then easy to give in to
the two extremes of future conception: that the universe either
fundamentally confounds our desires or that it fundamentally fulfills
them. These two extremes are called pessimism and optimism.
By contrast, the realist position is that the universe neither has some
intention to realize our desires, nor is it out to categorically deny
them; the universe simply is. There is no positive or negative fate
which alters our present to its preordained ends. The future is nothing
but the culmination of the present moment. Therefore, if we wish to
manifest a future moment which meets our desires, it is our duty to go
to work in creating it presently.
Within this recognition of existential neutrality we therefore find a
revolutionary horizon which is brought into being by action and
characterized by a simultaneously radical, yet practical goal setting.
Because we are fundamentally precluded from knowing the future moment,
until the final failure has arrived, we can never be certain that
success is truly lost. And, because we can never rest knowing that our
oncoming victory is absolute, we must continually act to safeguard what
has been achieved. It is not that we know we will succeed, it is that
there is a recognition that cannot be dismissed by doubt: if some goal
might be reached, there is always still more work to be done in
achieving it. In other words, realism suggests the hopeful approach.
Thus, we will call this perspective “hopeful realism.”
This sort of grounded hope stands in contrast to the hope of the
optimist. In conceptualizing an inevitable moral arc to the universe, or
to human affairs themselves, optimism creates a false image of how
progress and improvement are brought about to begin with. Nothing comes
into being unless we make it. To sit idly by is to guarantee failure. So
built on a falsehood, optimism abstracts the procession toward its
desired future. The optimist’s hope then often serves as a placating
naivete and therefore a cruelty to the downtrodden. It is a false hope.
The optimist thinks they can free themselves of the burden of truly
transformative action and thus their weakened response is one which
serves the ends of the dominators.
But we will not spend most of our time on the optimist. Instead, we must
confront the defeatism of the pessimist. After all, the perspective of
the pessimist can be easy to arrive at when we witness the size and
efficiency of the mega-machine: seeing a world full of horrific cruelty,
expedient politicians, and parasitic systems with seemingly
insurmountable odds of being overturned, the pessimist takes what might
seem like a very safe gamble that more will follow. As we said in the
introduction, to one who has been trapped in the darkness for a very
long time, it becomes easier to accept blindness, than to search for the
door.
Humans, after all, can delude themselves to nearly any paradigm, even
when its proclamations are deeply alienating and even actively reinforce
extraordinary misery to maintain them. What humans absolutely cannot
tolerate, is having their expectations of the world continually
disrupted, because this ingrains deep questions of doubt that cannot be
dismissed. Pessimism is then a sort of coping mechanism in an
indifferent universe. The pessimist can’t be let down by high
expectations, because they have pathologically discarded them. In
preparing only for the worst, they come to feel as if they have control
of their misery, that because they have chosen it, is somehow better. If
the worst comes, they reassure themselves that they have prepared for it
in the way that they could, then seemingly confirming their wisdom. But,
in doing so, they abandon the achievement of a greater possibility and
thus bring about the confirmation of their defeat; by having no hope for
success, they take their failure from the realm of possibility, into
reality.
The pessimist can then come to see all around them as a dead world which
cannot be salvaged. To see it burned to ashes can then become the most
liberatory impulse imaginable. The contention of the anarcho-nihilist
work, Blessed is the Flame, for example, is that life in the modern
world is really best comparable to the logic of concentration camps.
And, as we know, the concentration camps were not dismantled by their
inmates.
Instead, the occupants of the camps were contorted into the hell of
their conditions and came to focus their minds into an eternal present.
The past was a reflection of a world they could never return to and the
future was a cruel phantom. They could no more know that they would eat
again the next day than that they would one day escape the camps. The
acts of rebellion which did exist, were entirely focused in the present
moment and thus sought only to confound and entangle the operation of
the camps. In Blessed is the Flame, this presentist perception of the
passage of time which reifies a joyful rebellion is called “Messianic
Time.” It is the only thing, the author argues, that had any chance of
negating the camps and, because our conditions are most comparable to
theirs, they argue that it is the only type of futurity which has any
chance of negating our own. As they say[2]:
“Anarcho-nihilism understands the positive program as ‘one that confuses
desire with reality and extends that confusion into the future’ by
either making promises about what a revolutionary future might hold, or
attempting to bring those conditions about from within the existing
order. Such positive aspirations offer nothing more than a dangling
carrot for us to pursue in a situation in which the stick, string, and
prize all need to be destroyed.”
Here we see a notable trend in pessimistic thought. That is, the
pessimist wishes to convince others that they are the sober bearer of
hard truths, the only one willing to do the dirty work of accepting a
cruel and unwavering reality. The pessimist will then have a tendency to
co-opt the aesthetic of the utilitarian, presenting themselves as the
true pragmatist among the many idealists. But the pessimist cannot prove
that their position represents the acceptance of a hard truth; pessimism
is enticing precisely because it affords comfort in its simplicity.
Optimism and pessimism alike, both actually represent a sort of blind
faith in future circumstances, despite the insistence of the nihilist
that they have rejected future thinking. That is to say, the positions
of the optimists and the pessimists alike are not based on evidence, but
instead reactions borne from despair or naivete, beliefs built by a
desire to quell confrontation with uncertainty. There is no evidence,
after all, of any effectiveness in the pure present focused revolts any
more than there is evidence in the effectiveness of a teleological
procession toward progress.
Nonetheless, we would do well not to reject the pessimists outright.
These raw emotional reactions to the horrors of society; resentment and
anger, deconstruction and destruction, escape and rejection, should not
be dismissed as invalid responses to the death machine. As has been said
by Edward Culp in his work “Escape:”[3]
“Cynicism, depression, and hopelessness fill reservoirs unleashed
against Empire in revenge for the wounds it causes. Dangerous emotions
pose a threat, not just to those who bear them, but to their source,
Empire – the political imperative is to channel them. [...] [T]hese
dangerous emotions are not unhealthy reactions to a sound world; they
should be everyone’s natural reaction to the terrible situation facing
us all. To throw them away would only rob some subjects of the only
thing Empire has ever given them.”
These are fair points. We should not overcorrect in opposition to the
pessimist and dismiss insurrectionary negation outright. Such a system
as ours creates a great deal of misery and there is therefore a real
potential to transform the distress of the populace into a sort of
active nihilism. But, we must be constantly aware that, having centered
such a negative approach, many would-be revolutionaries can be coaxed
into a narrow and ineffective ideology of pure presentist revolt. Having
learned of the rot in the capitalist paradigm, but feeling helpless to
really change conditions, they can become a sort of clergy in a religion
of denunciation; generating righteous outrage; pointing their finger
astutely to the problem at hand and declaring its size, shape, and
nature, yet eternally failing to correctly prescribe a real solution.
While it is true that the concentration camps configured in their
occupants a present mind, devoid of future planning or past
contextualization, just as Blessed as the Flame has said, those who had
this mindset enforced upon them also did not destroy those concentration
camps. The concentration camps were certainly confounded by these
rebellions, but the concentration camps were ultimately ended by wide
scale conflict, carried out in earnest toward a goal, which was grasped
out of the future possibilities and brought into reality through action
toward an expectation. This is not to say, of course, that we should
mimic the United States and associated governments in their
organizational style. But it is to say, an organizational form is what
destroyed these death camps, not presentist rebellion. Why would we seek
to mimic the behaviors of those who were consumed by the dominator’s
hellscape and whom we can see did not succeed in liberating themselves
from them? Why would we seek to invoke in ourselves the mentality of the
institutionalized prisoners interned inside one of the most revolting
institutions ever devised by human beings? It is as Ernst Bloch says:
“Only in times of a declining old society, like modern Western society,
does a certain partial and transitory intention run exclusively
downwards. Then those who cannot find their way out of the decline are
confronted with fear of hope and against it. Then fear presents itself
as the subjectivist nihilism, as the objectivist mask of the crisis
phenomenon: which is tolerated but not seen through, which is lamented
but not changed.”
This conception cannot configure a new society then, because it does not
even conceive it and it cannot negate the current society because it
misunderstands how it came into being. This is to say: they are only
carrying out half of the anarchist program; the deconstructive aspect.
Capitalism will never implode just by sheer weight of its own
contradictions, neither by way of some natural stagist progression nor
through some chaotic systems collapse. As Deleuze, a notable advocate of
active nihilism, has said[4]:
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony
or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of
feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they
provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations
they regenerate. [...] [T]he more it breaks down, the more it
schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.”
Systems of power do not fear the simple setting of fires, because no
single fire will ever spread to the degree it consumes the machine. They
fear the construction of something which can actually undergo a systems
conflict and then maintain itself within the torrential winds which
follow such an affair. This is why, for example, that J. Edgar Hoover
was known to have said that it was not the Black Liberation Army that
made the Black Panthers enemy number one of the FBI, it was instead the
breakfast programs that were “potentially the greatest threat to efforts
by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”[5]
This is why it was a defeatist pessimism that the Nazis sought to imbue
into the Jews within the camps, because that is precisely the conception
of the world which maintained their dominance. The Nazi guards notably
did not counsel the interned Jews to “hope for a better world and then
work toward that end.” The mental degradation they imposed was entirely
predicated on the destruction of hope. This is because pessimism is
really just a manifestation of the diminished futurity which every
hierarchical system attempts to establish in order to maintain control.
As Bloch has said:
“[...] bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest
opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life,
it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, [...] The futility of
bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in
general, of existence per se.”
What Bloch says here of the bourgeois is true of all hierarchical power
structures. Hierarchical power benefits from the aimlessness of
defeatism and pure presentist negation, because hopeful realism is all
that truly confounds them. A truly active negation is simultaneously
constructive and deconstructive. As Bookchin says toward the end of his
work, Ecology of Freedom: “The means for tearing down the old are
available, both as hope and as peril. So, too, are the means for
rebuilding. The ruins themselves are mines for recycling the wastes of
an immensely perishable world into the structural materials of one that
is free as well as new.”
If we are to undergo such a project, in which we are required to recycle
the wastes of the world we seek to tear down, we must plan our actions
wisely. We cannot resign ourselves to simply destroying one machine, not
having prefigured the coherent, organized structure which will weather
the vacuum. Having chosen narrow cells of action and eschewed popular
integration, what impetus would really prevent the cancer of tyranny
from metastasizing once again? While the presentist rebel thinks they
represent the corrosive acid that will eat away the state of
hierarchical society, their refusal to think of a better future has
actually made them ineffective at undermining the machine, ineffective
at building a liberatory replacement, and often threatening to slide
into a ravine of despair and uselessness. This lack of planning and
organization threatens to form a weak, disorganized populace,
susceptible to a new exploiter. Worse, this future-lacking pessimism, if
it fails to cause the messianic rupture it desires, can devolve into a
doomer defeatism, which then only produces more weak opponents for the
machine to crush.
The true challenge and the only realistic perspective, is in a grounded
hope, because it sets its goals and then demands a path of action,
because it rejects the stale acceptance of an optimistic futurism,
because it rejects the aimlessness of pure presentism, and because it
refuses defeat until death. Dreams are not inherently unpractical. Hope
of a better world is not naivete. The gap between what can be imagined
and what currently exists, is the fuel of the engine of change. The goal
we must set for ourselves is to decide what dreams lie in the realm of
the achievable, then aim high, demanding that our shortfall land us
among a better future. In this, we see what was meant when Pisarev has
said[6]:
“One gulf is different to another [...] My dreams can overtake the
natural course of events, or they can go off at complete tangents, down
paths that the natural course of events can never tread. In the first
case dreaming [...] can even encourage and strengthen the working man’s
power to act [...] If a person were completely devoid of all capability
of dreaming in this way, if he were not able to hasten ahead now and
again to view in his imagination as a unified and completed picture the
work which is only now beginning to take shape in his hands, then I find
it absolutely impossible to imagine what would motivate the person to
tackle and to complete extensive and strenuous pieces of work in the
fields of art, science, and practical life [...] The gulf between dream
and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his
dream, if he observes life attentively, compares his observations with
his castles in the air and generally works towards the realization of
his dream-construct conscientiously. There only has to be some point of
contact between dream and life for everything to be in the best order.”
In the essay up until this point, we have emphasized the reality that we
do not know the future and that trying to forecast it too narrowly, is a
serious pitfall. But, while we do not know our future, there are
nonetheless valuable precedents to inspect. Every past, after all, was
once the future of a previous moment. And now, within our history lies a
ledger of those previous futures; it is a record of fits and starts,
horrors followed by triumphs and triumphs followed by horrors,
liberation both where it is expected and where it is not, suppression
and overthrow, destruction and construction in varying measures. All of
this once lay only in the potentialities of past peoples.
And with this in mind, one cannot look upon political history and only
take a dim view of our prospects, even though, surely, for thousands of
years, there were those who expressed their pessimism as fact. Upon
finishing their toil, surely there were these defeatists who would have
told their fellow serfs that imagining the end of monarchy was naive
optimism. And think of the evidence they could have brought to bear.
Historical record shows that peasant revolt after peasant revolt was
savagely suppressed and we can assume that many more took place that
were not even recorded.
Yet, throughout the history of humanity under hierarchical rule, there
has also been the impulse to recapture our alienated power through
collective action and in some occasions, the peoples living under
hierarchical society even had the necessary will to enact their desired
re-organization. This impulse toward liberation proceeds back to some of
the earliest societies. Murray Bookchin, in Ecology of Freedom, recounts
one of the oldest of these momentary successes, an event in ancient
Egypt, around 2500 BC, called the “black redistribution” by the
dispossessed ruling class.[7] They “‘react to the “black redistribution’
not only with personal fear and a savage lust for vengeance, but with
horror toward the desecration of their hierarchical vision of “order.”
[...]
“Behold the palaces thereof, their walls are dismantled .... Behold, all
the craftsmen, they do no work; the enemies of the land impoverish its
crafts. [Behold, he who reaped] the harvest knows naught of it; he who
has not plowed [fills his granaries] .... Civil war pays no taxes ....
For what is a treasure without its revenues? ... Behold, he who has no
yoke of oxen is [now] possessor of a herd; and he who found no plow-oxen
for himself is [now] owner of a herd. Behold, he who had no grain is
[now] owner of granaries; and he who used to fetch grain for himself
[now] has it issued [from his own granary].”
But, while it is laudable that they achieved this affair, we still must
concede to the pessimist, the revolt did not last. Just like the Nazis
crushed the attempts at concentration camp revolts, so too did this
black redistribution get crushed in time. And thus, judging from the
precedent of history, we are forced to accept that not every
insurrection can be waged under the impression that it will succeed or,
if it does, that it will last indefinitely. We cannot overcorrect to the
naivete of the optimist. Instead, each insurrection and every act of
prefiguration we undertake must see itself as part of an endless
striving for liberation, planning in all ways for what must be done to
arrive upon the desired goal, ultimately aware that it is part of an
endless process which may one day eventually produce the transformation
of this world system and have its necessary part in the abolition of
human domination.
These many attempts at revolution were all necessary components of the
broader revolutionary process itself. The peasant revolts expressed an
emergent impulse toward resistance which is always bound to boil up time
and time again, providing examples of both martyrdom and success for
struggles to come. They were both a representation of the ensuing wave
which crushed the old monarchies beneath its weight and an impulse
toward self-emancipation characteristic of all peoples held under
suppression.
But no simple act of force could have produced the liberal era. The
final success of the capitalists over the aristocratic class was born in
a constructive, prefigured program within the belly of feudal relations.
In the 13^(th) and 14^(th) century, there arose in the Italian
city-states and lower country the mercantile ruling class of the
“bourgs.”[8] This word, “bourg,” is even the root of the more familiar
word “bourgeois.” Yet this capitalist class did not truly come to hold
its decisive power until the 17^(th) century and the revolutionary
transformations which have been studied time and time again by socialist
thinkers, would not come until the 18^(th) century.
For this roughly four hundred year span, the claims that feudal
relations would one day be superseded by capitalism would likely have
appeared absurd to many. And, though it may have been a deeply
incomplete destruction of the system of domination, this process
nonetheless represented a true transformation of the relations of
society, and those who expressed their pessimism were ultimately in the
wrong.
We simply do not have four hundred years. And if our program is all that
more urgent, so too should we be doggedly pursuing the construction of
our dual power, lest we leave ourselves unprepared. After all,
revolutions are often quite unexpected. Take, for example, the February
Revolution in Russia. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her memoir
titled “Reminiscences of Lenin” recounts a speech he gave in January of
1917[9]:
“Ilyich never for a moment doubted that [grim battles for proletarian
revolution] were the prospects. But, as to how soon that coming
revolution would take place – that, of course, Ilyich could not know.
“We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of
this coming revolution,” he told the people gathered before him.
Yet only a few weeks later, the Czar was overthrown by the trade unions
and the factory committees. And a few months after that, Lenin would end
up at the helm of a historic revolutionary project. This upset fueled an
entire generation of revolutionary attempts. In so many of the waves of
transformation, it was the work of some great revolutionaries who
preceded their era who gave examples of revolt and bravery that inspired
hope within the people to emancipate themselves. In this way, we can
look to the work of the factory committees and the workers’ councils
within revolutionary Russia as the demonstration of an undying impulse
toward liberation that lays within all subjugated beings; just as the
Paris commune or Spanish Catalonia or the KAPM or the many peasant
revolts themselves, though each must be understood upon their own basis.
Each are, for better or worse, experiments in the development of a fully
conceived revolutionary practice and their stories all contribute to a
growing canon of revolt. Though we must be gravely careful in
recognizing how each of their failures could have been avoided, we must
also support the impetus to revolt, for within it, we discover the will
to transform conditions.
The acts of those who have struggled before us inspire us toward action.
We have never been a species who sealed away our martyrs as purely
cautionary tales. These great struggles, even ending in pools of blood,
always tend to find their ways back to the public psyche as symbols of a
process toward emancipation, just as John Brown and Nat Turner still
live on in the memories of the abolition movement, so too are
contemporary anarchists learning the words of the Japanese anarchist,
Kanno Sugako just before her execution by the state[10]: “Born in a tiny
country, I am sacrificing my little body for a glimmer of hope.” Upon
the tombstone of Lucia Sanchez Saornil, who lived through the Spanish
Civil War and had to flee to France, the words are still inscribed “But
is it true that hope has died?” To this we respond, hope cannot die. Not
only because it is motivated by an eternal factor in human intention,
but because it is required for the churning cycle. As Kropotkin laid out
in his work The Spirit of Revolt[11]:
“Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the
means to transform them into action,--men of integrity for whom the act
is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable
to a life contrary to their principles,--intrepid souls who know that it
is necessary to dare in order to succeed,-- these are the lonely
sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently
roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in
hand, to the conquest of their rights [...] it awakens the spirit of
revolt: it breeds daring. The old order, supported by the police, the
magistrates, the gendarmes and the soldiers, appeared unshakable, like
the old fortress of the Bastille, which also appeared impregnable to the
eyes of the unarmed people gathered beneath its high walls equipped with
loaded cannon. But soon it became apparent that the established order
had not the force one had supposed. One courageous act has sufficed to
upset in a few days the entire governmental machinery, to make the
colossus tremble; another revolt has stirred a whole province into
turmoil, and the army, till now always so imposing, has retreated before
a handful of peasants armed with sticks and stones. The people observe
that the monster is not so terrible as they thought they begin dimly to
perceive that a few energetic efforts will be sufficient to throw it
down. Hope is born in their hearts, and let us remember that if
exasperation often drives men to revolt, it is always hope, the hope of
victory, which makes revolutions.”
All that is, was brought about by the striving of a previous peoples
toward a goal. And it was that striving, not knowing what might come,
that has been the only force in bringing new worlds into existence.
But perhaps the point is still not clear. In order to illustrate these
ideas in more depth, let us conceive of a thought experiment. Standing
upon a hill, three archers meet. A target lies through a small valley
which is exceptionally far away and under high winds. Within the
experiences of all three who are present, it is unprecedented that such
a target can be reached, especially under such poor conditions. With
this, the three set upon a discussion of the challenge. The first says:
“the target is unreachable. I have fired many arrows in my day and I
have never seen a person achieve such a task.” The second says “I am
certain that it will be no challenge at all to reach the target because
we are, every day, achieving greater and greater feats. Surely it will
be no difficulty if we aid the natural procession toward success!” The
third says, however, “I do not know whether it is reachable or not...but
I will do what is necessary to achieve it.” What none of these archers
know, is that only an expert will ever hit the mark and they will only
ever do so 1/10,000 times.
The pessimistic archer spends the first few days training, but endeavors
only toward the task of firing his bow. “It is no use wasting my time
working to achieve a greater expertise to hit this target. It is not
achievable. I merely continue firing my arrows for the joy of archery. I
know that I will not achieve such an impossible task, but I am
invigorated by the attempt.”
The optimist archer tries for quite some time, firing their arrows only
lazily, failing time and time again and confused by it “I do not know
why I cannot reach the target. I continue attempting and I am certain
that such a target will be reachable if only I allow the process to play
out, but I nonetheless continue to fail.”
Meanwhile, the last archer goes to work immediately improving their aim.
They set their eye upon the task without conceiving whether they will
achieve the goal or not. The hopeful realist, instead, merely asks what
better training might be necessary if there is some world wherein they
might hit the mark. “I do not know whether it is reachable or not...but
I will do what is necessary to achieve it.” The winds blow their arrows
about and they fail to meet their mark, but they come closer than the
others before long.
Soon, the pessimistic archer gives up. The pleasure has dried up and
thus motivation has ceased. “This isn’t achievable, as I said. I think I
will go focus upon goals that are more realistic, such as the targets in
the archery range back in the village. I bid you both to continue this
hopeless task.”
The optimist stays, but just the same as before, they come to the fore
and they fire their arrows, but they do not endeavor to properly improve
their aim as is needed. They say to the third archer “I still can’t seem
to reach the target, even though I don’t understand why. I know that one
must merely become an archer and try again and again and the task we
desire shall be fulfilled. But I just cannot seem to make any progress.”
Meanwhile, the last archer continues improving their archery, achieving
mastery as they strive for an exceptional goal. The optimist returns
again and again, never reaching closer to the mark, never conceiving
what is necessary to succeed, while the archer who hopes fires their
arrows endlessly, approaching the goal more and more. As they do, over
the course of weeks, the hopeful realist begins to find that, even with
this mastery, the task is exceedingly difficult. Indeed, having attained
expertise, as we have said, they must continue firing arrows for an
average of 10,000 times before one shall meet the mark. But none of
these three know such a thing. The task appears only repetitive and
infuriating. The only certainty appears to be failure.
Over this long suffering process, the optimist gives up firing arrows.
After all, if all things are guaranteed to get better, why must they be
the one who endeavors? They look to the last archer, whose skill is much
greater, and pat them on the back as they leave “I will see you back at
the archery range.”
In this moment, the hopeful archer experiences despair. They stand alone
before a windswept valley, filled with arrows which have failed to meet
their mark. The rose-tinted naivete of the optimist was wrong and the
defeatism of the pessimist appears to foreclose failure in this
Sisyphean task. For a moment, they consider that perhaps the pessimist
is right. They entertain that their goal may be truly unachievable. But
they are reminded of their own creed. “I do not know whether it is
reachable or not...but I will do what is necessary to achieve it.”
And it is only in the last archer’s rejection of defeatism that they
fire those 10,000 arrows. One after another arrows leave their bow and
land short or long or left or right of the target. The wind blows them
about and the hopeful realist accounts for the wind astutely as best
they can, its torrential gusts constantly confounding their mastery.
However, eventually, sailing through the air as so many had before, the
winds blowing in some fortuitous way, and the hopeful archer’s mastery
having become exceptional, the arrow lands upon the target. Only this
hopeful realist, who set their lofty goal and adjusted their actions to
its dictates had any chance of achieving the task. Upon the hilltop,
this last archer stands alone, having endeavored one hundred times as
much as the pessimist and optimist to achieve it and having attained a
mastery far beyond anything they could conceive because of it.
Revolution requires both our expertise and the confluence of the great
circumstances of history. To achieve such a challenging goal, we will
need to train ourselves to mastery in confounding the mega-machine and
bringing more people to the fore, ingraining within them a realistically
grounded hope, such that one of our many attempts may meet the mark. If
we cannot conceive of our future in such a way, wherein some hope may
always be kindled, we will only ever achieve an aimless and unskilled
flailing. Hope is not a luxury, it is a prerequisite of successful
struggle. If we cannot stoke the dream of a better future, we cannot
make it. As Kropotkin says in his work Law and Authority[12]:
“It may [...] be said that the more miserable a man is, the more he
dreads every sort of change, lest it may make him more wretched still.
Some ray of hope, a few scraps of comfort, must penetrate his gloomy
abode before he can begin to desire better things, to criticise the old
ways of living, and prepare to imperil them for the sake of bringing
about a change. So long as he is not imbued with hope, so long as he is
not freed from the tutelage of those who utilise his superstition and
his fears, he prefers remaining in his former position.”
And so we must act, even knowing nothing for certain. It is not only, as
Frantz Fanon has said,[13] that “we revolt simply because, for many
reasons, we can no longer breathe.” It is because we are one of the few
species which can actually dream of better worlds. In this extraordinary
capacity, we may become the architects of our future moments, if only we
act. And crucially, we must act. Because, even if there is some
inevitable revolutionary future, it is still not one that is known to
us, for better or for worse. When all is said and done, we cannot know
the possibility or impossibility of a struggle which seeks to
fundamentally break with the previous paradigm. The very enactment of
this paradigm embodies a fully new conception of society. And so, in
seeking this exceptional goal, our response must perpetually be “I do
not know what lies ahead, but I will do what is necessary to bring about
the future I demand.”
What defines this hope is that it is a goal that never dies. The hopeful
realist asks until their last moments what is left to be done to achieve
the thing at hand. Hope refuses internal defeat, it turns its bearer
into a perpetual being-in-struggle and, in doing so, welcomes the
possibility of liberation into our communal future. Hope is the fertile
soil where a new seed might be planted and so, the possibility that we
might tend it to fruition. In hope, there is the construction of
something new, of the circumscribing of new lines and of the pioneering
of new ideas which may then bring transformation. Hope animates the
wheels of change. Hope channels distress into action and actualizes
theory. In the darkness, hope does not assume help will come, nor does
it give up, it lights a candle so that we may set out in search of the
door.
But, as John Cleese humorously said,[14] “it’s not the despair [...] I
can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” And it is true: hope
is hard. Both pessimism and optimism offer an easy way out. Instead of
shouldering the burden of determined action and constant vigilance, they
flee to a false certainty and reduce the complexity of the real world to
a dead symbol. The realistic position is that there is no certainty;
that we are beings observing a perpetual present and cast out before an
unknowable future. And, in this great churning vortex, we are bid to
act.
So we must ask ourselves seriously what future it is that we wish to
bring into existence. Because whatever actions that we choose, they will
coordinate with that future. If we wish to create a world that
holistically meets the needs and desires of the biosphere, we must work
towards it consciously. We must inspire within the populace a fire for
revolt and transformative construction. Because, if we do not, we are
certain to fail. If the people are not roused to action, us among them,
and we all instead convince ourselves that our inevitable future
precludes the importance of our prefigurative work, ecological collapse
will go unhalted and the great social mega-machine will escalate its
oppression prolifically.
Just...imagine you are able to speak with someone from the hellworld
after the decline of life on Earth. After the planet has been so
thoroughly ravaged that hardly any terrestrial life will remain, save
for these humans and their machinations. Upon the rocky surface, only
bacteria will hearken to the common ancestry of terrestrial
consciousness. Think, when you imagine you will speak to them, that this
person will have never heard the birds singing in the morning light,
never seen great tree canopies full of life, butterflies flitting
between flower heads which sway from the gentle breeze. They will never
have known what it is to hear the peace and racket of a primal nature
and connect with this ancient and unbroken lineage between all life. No
spores will ever again carry upon the wind. No sweet smell of
honeysuckle will drift to meet your nose, no orange shall offer up its
supple skin, concealing an ancient pleasure, nor shall any head of wheat
bear a loaf of bread, nor any bush bear its berries, nor bee hive
enclose honey. The great teaming life that uniquely characterizes this
planet in a vast, dead universe, will have joined the deadness of the
great expanse, leaving only a husk behind, populated by a people who
must know what their species has done to the mother that birthed it. If
you chose defeatism or naive optimism and this future human asked you
“why did you not act to stop this?” what would you say? What could you
say, knowing that your inaction was instrumental in bringing about this
hellworld? I contend to you that the only excuse which could conceivably
suffice is “I fought until my dying breath to stop this from happening.”
Anyone who bids you to sit down and fold under the weight of this burden
counsels you to allow the subjugation of all that is good and, in time,
the eradication of life on this planet. It is precisely as Bookchin has
said in his Ecology of Freedom:
“The crises are too serious and the possibilities too sweeping to be
resolved by customary modes of thought-the very sensibilities that
produced these crises in the first place. Years ago, the French students
in the May-June uprising of 1968 expressed this sharp contrast of
alternatives magnificently in their slogan: ‘Be practical! Do the
impossible!’ To this demand, the generation that faces the next century
can add the more solemn injunction: ‘If we don’t do the impossible, we
shall be faced with the unthinkable!’”
We must do much more than to simply reject the death-oriented society we
have been given. Mere rejection is not negation. The negation of a
death-orientation lies crucially within the embrace of a
life-orientation. So, while we must revolt, we must not lose sight of
our goal. Because, if we seek to build a society of human autonomy,
solidaric coordination, and ecological integration, then we must embody
those precepts. And those of us who are the opponents of this horrible
machine, must go to work with haste, reifying the new ethos of
complementarity and creative strength. If we do not, this death-oriented
machine will have imprinted itself forever not only upon our world, but
upon us. As Howard Zinn says at the end of his work, A People’s History
of the United States[15]:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based
on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but
also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to
emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see
only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember
those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved
magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the
possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different
direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to
wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession
of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in
defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
This “infinite succession of presents” as Howard Zinn calls them, are
the center of our struggle. And in each present, we must decide: will we
accept that we are nothing but historical automatons, carrying out a
machine-like inevitability? Will we give in to the systematization of
the mega-machine and its desire to turn us into thoughtless cogs? Will
we watch as the sun sets on the great horizon of Earthly life? Or will
we choose an eternal struggle for emancipation? Will we choose death? Or
life? These are the questions that stand before us and, if we seek to
abolish our misery, the choice between them is clear. Under a system of
suffering, we will suffer if we do nothing and we will suffer if we act.
However, if we act, this horror may one day end.
So if a fire now grows within you, even if it is only a spark, let it
catch; tend it carefully to fruition so that it might spread outside
your bounds. Let it invigorate a truly revolutionary conception instead
of a simple resentment. Then hand each ember alight to those others who
suffer...so that you might bring about the dignity within them and offer
the possibility that they will then seek their own liberation in turn.
Only hope can lead us through this long darkness wherein our guiding
light is so dim and our possibility of escape sparkles so delicately.
Your fulfillment and meaning lie inescapably within a lifelong process
of struggle. All that is left for you is to accept this burden and not
to let it crush you, but to transform yourself into the being you must
be to bear it. Reject all of the doomsayers trapped by the misery of the
death machine. Reject the rose-tinted naivete of those who would bid you
to simply trust to the processes of history. Resist defeat and inaction
until death. Because, if we act, then eternally...there is hope.
[1] Ernst Bloch, “The Principle of Hope”
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm)
(http://library.lol/main/F13D673A8D5F2CFA3CB25BB754A31B3A)
[2] Serafinski, “Blessed is the Flame”
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame)
[3] Edward Culp, “Escape”
(https://www.academia.edu/5516631/Escape_Dissertation_)
[4] Giles Deleuze, “Anti-Oedipus”
(https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf)
[5]
J. Edgar Hoover
(https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party)
[6] Dmitri Pisarev “Blunders of Immature Thinking” (Cited in Principle
of Hope)
[7] Murray Bookchin, “The Ecology of Freedom”
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-ecology-of-freedom)
[8] Bichler and Nitzan, “Capital as Power: Toward a New Cosmology of
Capitalism”
(https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/157829/1/bna-285_20100500_bn_casp_toward_a_new_cosmology_of_capitalism.pdf)
[9] Nadezhda Krupskaya, “Reminisces of Lenin”
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/krupskaya/works/rol/index.htm)
[10] Kanno Sugako, “Reflections on the Way to the Gallows”
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kanno-sugako-reflections-on-the-way-to-the-gallows)
[11] Peter Kropotkin, “The Spirit of Revolt”
(http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/spiritofrevolt.html)
[12] Peter Kropotkin, “Law and Authority”
(http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/lawauthority.html)
[13] Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth”
(https://monoskop.org/images/6/6b/Fanon_Frantz_The_Wretched_of_the_Earth_1963.pdf)
[14] John Cleese, “Clockwise”
[15] Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States”
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/howard-zinn-a-people-s-history-of-the-united-states)