Hope and Revolution

An Anarchist comrade from Brazil, a visual artist, recently wrote in a long essay concerning elections:

I have a philosophy, I like to learn from whatever life brings me. What did I learn from all this? That independent of all this is just a scare, or not, 4 years from now, we’ll be right here, exactly in this place of fear, despair, disagreement, people drooling hate on both sides and people ignoring everything we’re talking about.

Note, the names change, the captions change, the scenario looks different, but deep down, the essence is exactly the same! There’s a pattern here! Can I just see that? And it’s about that pattern that I’ve been trying to talk about, whether it’s in the videos that I made, or the cartoons I drew.

My despair does not have to do with the current scenario (that is, in itself desperate), it has to do with the fact that we are so immersed in the scenario (just as we were in so many others), that we lost sight that the thing will repeat, again, and again and again… Just like those nightmares when we wake up to find ourselves inside another nightmare to wake up in another and another and never have peace…

The system is making us a people without peace, without soul… it is not Bolsonaro, or Lula, or the cup, or fear… the system has been my nightmare. Civilisation has been my nightmare. And I don’t want it anymore, I think we deserve freedom.
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Here's my reply:

Please forgive me that I lack the skills to respond in Portuguese. I am writing in response to your last four paragraphs, for they touched me deeply.

I think you are very much right to say that the problem is greater than any particular crisis, any single election or crisis. The problem we face is that of a mouse in the field of wheat as a great machine comes to harvest. Does the mouse hide behind this stalk or that? Does the mouse run for a shallow burrow? The mouse might miss the cutters yet still be crushed by the weight of the machine.

The advent of neo-liberalism has changed the world situation in ways that the great writers and organisers of socialism and anarchism’s past could hardly imagine. I think that even the language of “capital vs. labour” only faintly captures the world situation today. Nor does the notion of the USA as a “great capitalist power” cover the restructuring of nations and peoples that has occurred since World War II.

It is not a handful of capitalists that we must overcome, but the conception of the social universe that neo-liberalism imposes, where peoples, nations, and individual societies are simply replaceable commodities.

I’ve spent most of my adult life organising and working among the poorest communities in my country, only to realise after more than 40 years, that the structures of life among the poor simply replicate the larger system in which we all live.

Among the urban poor in America, in a neighbourhood filled with wretched housing, where unemployment is universal, where the accents of language, the clothes worn, and even the food we eat marks us as permanently poor, we watch in fear as one group of drug profiteers seizes power from the previous group of profiteers, using tactics of violence and intimidation. If the police disrupt such a group by raids and mass arrests, another takes their place within hours or days.

The children on the streets admire the men with guns and fancy cars, the women with nice clothes and who with their men, sit in the back corner of the club, drinking “the good stuff” and eating meals no one else can afford.

It is not this profiteer or that whom we need to be overcome, but a system that leads people to fear real change, the change that would make the role of the profiteer an ethical outrage, an unthinkable monster that no child would admire.

On a national level we have the same dilemma: politicians like Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi are passing infatuations, representing only further ensnarements into a system that inverts the human ability to love into the admiration of greed and power seeking. Some are more dangerous than others, as Trump is more dangerous than Pelosi, but they are both only aspects of this ugly, dark mirror, a mirror that show us only our worst.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, show me what I can be?
And the mirror says, You can be rich and powerful.
Or perhaps it says You can change things if you are strong enough or rich enough.

Both answers are false.

Until we can break the mirror, realising that the power for change comes not from you or me, but from a greater more loving and caring “us,” then there is no battle to be won. We will just watch as one gang of profiteers takes power from another.

What I hope to see, is that someday soon we begin to take power apart, raising up genuinely different structures. They will perhaps be tiny at first, but they will grow to replace the tumorous growth of neo-liberalism that has stricken us all. What will come will be the healthy tissues of cooperation, trustworthiness and what the religious call “mutual regard,” that important change that comes when we look at a stranger and see not the face of an enemy or rival, but another mind and body that can be involved in the work of creating.

The revolutionaries of France, in the 1790’s called it “Fraternité.” By creating, I do not mean replicating the system of entitled greed which enslaves us, but the reply to that system: a loving creativity, that will to address the real issues that faces us all, and threaten us all: climate change, our poisoned environment, resource deficits, rampant population growth, etc. etc.

More than armed revolutionaries, running in the hills, or hiding in cities, we need to create the very language of revolution and begin injecting it into our communities. Today in America this is still just barely possible. The vast weight of government, the media, and nearly every social institution fights us, but it is still possible to encourage and cajole, and provide a framework for revolutionary speech and thought.

When I speak to young, self-proclaimed “anarchists” here, I ask “What have you built? How have you made your revolutionary impulses into something concrete? How have you shown friends and neighbours that revolution is not just possible, but above all desirable, a fact that must be revealed, a truth more important than greed?

I do not presume to give advice to a comrade who has faced such fear and danger as you. The USA, for all its oppressions has, until recently, served neo-liberalism at home with a velvet fist. We are surveilled and catalogued by the alphabet of Government agencies, the FBI, NSA, DHS, ICE, etc., and then largely ignored. But when they throw a few dozen in prison, thousands cower. When they throw hundreds of thousands in prison, it’s defined as a nebulous, impenetrable social problem: “racism,” or “drugs” or “poverty.”

 Yet here we are, with by far the greatest proportion of our people in prison of any nation in the world. Among them, we are told, there are “no political prisoners.” You may draw your own conclusions.

Comrade, I share many of your hesitancies, fears and concerns. I have a son in his early twenties, and I am sure that the future he faces is much, much darker and more threatening than I can even imagine. Yet for his sake, and the sake of others like him, I think we must continue. We must build the very possibility of change.