My partner and I are making our way through The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …, a posthumous book of essays by David Graeber, with one of us reading it aloud while the other is cooking. Thursday night, Jim was reading an essay called “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” a piece about the late 20th and early 21st century global justice movement.
He read these words:
Direct action is a form of resistance that, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. [emphasis added]
And I exclaimed “Yes” and would have thrust my fist in the air if I hadn’t been stirring a pot.
Now this is in part because I am inspired, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, by the likes of the Zen Monk Takuan Soho, who did not cower before the powerful or mistreat those who lacked power.
I want to move through the world as a free person, to treat all with respect so long as they do the same to me, and to stand up to bullies and Nazis. That this may be a perilous time for such an attitude does not keep it from resonating deeply with me.
I have a friend who refers to the rich and powerful as our “owners.” It drives me crazy, though I understand what she means and can even see some merit in the usage when I think of organizing unions of workers and tenants and others.
But I do not acknowledge that anyone has that kind of right over me. That certainly includes the broligarch in chief who is orchestrating the destruction of our government right now.
This is also driven by my feminism, because so much of what is going on right now is aimed at making women into second-class citizens again – people with limited rights but still bound by the law – and I am damned if I am willing to go along with that.
I didn’t think I was inferior back when the law treated me as such – I am old enough to remember when the minimum wage for women was lower than that for men, just as an example – and I have no intention of recognizing anyone’s right to reinstate that kind of misogynistic discrimination.
Some of it is rooted in the current of American Exceptionalism in which I was raised. In my childhood, it was not uncommon to hear a dispute on the playground that ended in the words “It’s a free country.”
Mind you, this was in the Jim Crow South, so there was plenty of irony in those words. It has never been as true as it should be and at times (not just these) has been even less true.
But we kids meant it on a gut level. We believed it. This is a free country. We don’t have to put up with that nonsense.
Despite the appalling image of the grifter-in-chief in a crown that was tweeted out by the White House this week, people my age grew up in a United States where we took pride in not having kings. (We fought a revolution about that, remember?)
I grew up in a relatively conservative area, but it also occurs to me that a lot of the kids who yelled “It’s a free county” had parents who were members of unions.
We weren’t big on bosses anymore than we liked kings.
My parents weren’t in unions, but not for want of trying. One of several reasons I liked being part of the News Guild in my working days is that my mother tried hard to organize with it – when it was still the Newspaper Guild – way back in the day. And it was a rare day indeed when my father might express any respect for any of his bosses.
Which is all to say that even American Exceptionalism, rooted as it is in the rampant dishonesty exemplified by genocide and slavery, may have some virtues. I doubt I am the only person in the United States who feels an emotional right to act as if I am free.
Of course, some of those others may have very different ideas of what freedom means than I do. There are too many people in this country who believe that freedom means they have the right to walk over everyone else.
In the essay, Graeber points out that one of the core things about the global justice movement was that a truly democratic process was as key to what people were doing as the results they were seeking. We saw this most clearly during Occupy, which built on those earlier years.
I see it most clearly right now in the organizations I work with, where inclusion (not to mention diversity and equity) is always important. We may not always get it right, but we do pay attention.
I also listened to a webinar this week on “Organizing and Mobilization during Democratic Backsliding” moderated by Erica Chenoweth, who has done extensive research on civil resistance. It was presented by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, which is part of the Kennedy School at Harvard.
As a person who went to a state university and has more than a little concern about powerful private universities, I have some skepticism about Harvard’s commitment to democracy, but Prof. Chenoweth and the others who spoke demonstrate that there is still good and even revolutionary work being done in such places.
One of the speakers, Cornell Brooks, a lawyer with an extensive background in civil rights law including at the Department of Justice and a former head of the NAACP, mentioned that in working with younger leaders in particular he found a commitment to focusing on democracy as a “robust means,” not just a vague end.
That struck me in much the same way as Graeber’s words. We need to use democratic means to achieve democratic ends.
There was much more in the webinar – it was recorded and if I can find a link to it I will add it to this. Another piece that resonated with me came from Marshall Ganz, a scholar of grassroots organizing who also worked directly in the field. He said something to the effect of when you hit rock bottom – and we have likely done that – you have to change.
That resonates, because while we may be relying on some core norms of our society – like the rule of law – in resisting in this moment, I don’t think we can go back to the status quo. It had too many weaknesses and set us up for this moment.
Ganz also said we need a social movement in this time. I think he’s right. I’m giving that idea a lot of thought right now.
I wish David Graeber were still here to give us some ideas on what that social movement might look like and help us build it. But he did leave us plenty of ideas to chew on and make our own.
Right now I’ll go with defiantly acting as if I’m already free.