Editor’s note: Asking questions, questions that emerge from your empathy if you care for life on the planet, and questions that emerge from your confusion if you see that so many things are going so badly wrong, is a very important, crucial step. We completely agree with the last paragraph of this article and our answer is DGR’s Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy.
We do not know how to stop the planetary destruction caused by capital — but by asking the right questions we can find our way forward together.
We live in a failed system. It is becoming clearer every day that the present organization of society is a disaster, that capitalism is unable to secure an acceptable way of living. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural phenomenon but the result of the social destruction of biodiversity and other pandemics are likely to follow. The global warming that is a threat to both human and many forms of non-human life is the result of the capitalist destruction of established equilibria. The acceptance of money as the dominant measure of social value forces a large part of the world’s population to live in miserable and precarious conditions.
The destruction caused by capitalism is accelerating. Growing inequality, a rise in racist violence, the spread of fascism, increasing tensions between states and the accumulation of power by police and military. Moreover, the survival of capitalism is built on an ever-expanding debt that is doomed to collapse at some point.
The situation is urgent, we humans are now faced with the real possibility of our own extinction.
How do we get out of here? The traditional answer of those who are conscious of the scale of social problems: through the state. Political thinkers and politicians from Hegel to Keynes and Roosevelt and now Biden have seen the state as a counterweight to the destruction wreaked by the economic system. States will solve the problem of global warming; states will end the destruction of biodiversity; states will alleviate the enormous hardship and poverty resulting from the present crisis. Just vote for the right leaders and everything will be all right. And if you are very worried about what is happening, just vote for more radical leaders — Sanders or Corbyn or Die Linke or Podemos or Evo Morales or Maduro or López Obrador — and things will be fine.
The problem with this argument is that experience tells us that it does not work. Left-wing leaders have never fulfilled their promises, have never brought about the changes that they said they would. In Latin America, the left-wing politicians who came to power in the so-called Pink Wave at the start of this century, have been closely associated with extractivism and other forms of destructive development. TheTren Maya which is Mexican president López Obrador’s favorite project in Mexico at the moment is just the latest example of this. Left-wing parties and politicians may be able to bring about minor changes, but they have done nothing at all to break the destructive dynamic of capital.
THE STATE IS NOT THE ANSWER
But it is not just experience that tells us that the state is not the counterweight to capital that some make it out to be. Theoretical reflection tells us the same thing. The state, which appears to be separate from capital, is actually generated by capital and depends on capital for its existence. The state is not a capitalist and its workers do not on the whole generate the income it needs for its existence. That income comes from the exploitation of workers by capital, so that the state actually depends on that exploitation, that is, on the accumulation of capital, to reproduce its own existence.
The state is obliged, by its very form, to promote the accumulation of capital. Capital, too, depends on the existence of an instance — the state — that does not act like a capitalist and that appears to be quite separate from capital, to secure its own reproduction. The state appears to be the center of power, but in fact power lies with the owners of capital, that is, with those persons who dedicate their existence to the expansion of capital. In other words, the state is not a counterweight to capital: it is part of the same uncontrollable dynamic of destruction.
The fact that the state is bound to capital means that it excludes us. State democracy is a process of exclusion that says: “Come and vote every four or five years, then go home and accept what we decide.” The state is the existence of a body of full-time officials who assume the responsibility of ensuring the welfare of society — in a way compatible with the reproduction of capital, of course. By assuming that responsibility, they take it away from us. But, whatever their intentions, they are unable to fulfill the responsibility, because they do not have the countervailing power that they appear to have: what they do and how they do it is shaped by the need to ensure the reproduction of capital.
Just now, for example, politicians are talking of the need for a radical change in political direction as the world emerges from the pandemic, but at no point does any politician or government official suggest that part of that change in direction must be the abolition of a system based on the pursuit of profit.
If the state is not the answer to ending capitalist destruction, then it follows that channeling our concerns into political parties cannot be the answer either, since parties are organizations that aim to bring about change through the state. Attempts to bring about radical change through parties and the taking of state power have generally ended in the creation of authoritarian regimes at least as bad as those they fought to change.
ASKING WE WALK
So, if the state is not the answer, where do we go? How do we get out of here? We come to a conference like this, of course, to discuss anarchist answers. But there are at least three problems: firstly, there are not the millions of people here that we need for a real change of direction; secondly, we have no answers; and thirdly, the label “anarchist” probably does not help.
Why are there not millions of people here? There is certainly a widespread growing feeling of anger, desperation and an awareness that the system is not working. But why is this anger channeled either towards left-reformist parties and candidates (Die Linke, Sanders, Corbyn, Tsipras) or to the far right, and not towards efforts that push against-and-beyond the system? There are many explanations, but one that seems important to me is Leonidas Oikonomakis’ comment on the election of Syriza in Greece in 2015 that, even after years of very militant anti-statist protest against austerity, it still seemed to people that the state was the “only game in town.”
When we think of global warming, of stopping violence against women, of controlling the pandemic, of resolving our economic desperation in the present crisis, it is still hard not to think that the state is where the answers lie, even when we know that it is not.
Perhaps we have to give up the idea of answers. We have no answers. It cannot be a question of opposing anarchist answers to state answers. The state gives answers, wrong answers. We have questions, urgent questions, new questions because this situation of impending extinction has never existed before. How can we stop the destructive dynamic of capital? The only answer that we have is that we do not know.
It is important to say that we do not know, for two reasons. Firstly because it happens to be true. We do not know how we can bring the present catastrophe to an end. We have ideas, but we really do not know. And secondly, because a politics of questions is very different from a politics of answers. If we have the answers, it is our duty to explain them to others. That is what the state does, that is what vanguardist parties do. If we have questions but no answers, then we must discuss them together to try and find ways forward. “Preguntando caminamos,” as the Zapatistas say: “Asking we walk.”
The process of asking and listening is not the way to a different society, it is already the creation of a different society. The asking-listening is already a mutual recognizing of our distinct dignities. We ask-and-listen to you because we recognize your dignity. This is the opposite of state politics. The state talks. It pretends to ask-and-listen but it does not and cannot because its existence depends on reproducing a form of social organization based on the command of money.
Our asking-listening is an anti-identitarian movement. We recognize your dignity not because you are an anarchist or a communist, or German or Austrian or Mexican or Irish, or because you are a woman or Black or Indigenous. Labels are very dangerous — even if they are “nice” labels — because they create identitarian distinctions. To say “we are anarchists” is self-contradictory because it reproduces the identitarian logic of the state: we are anarchists, you are not; we are German, you are not. If we are against the state, then we against its logic, against its grammar.
A MOVEMENT OF SELF-DETERMINATION
We have no answers, but our walking-asking does not start from zero. It is part of a long history of walking-asking. Just in these days we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and the centenary of the Kronstadt Uprising. In the present, we have the experience of the Zapatistas to inspire us, just as they are preparing their journey across the Atlantic to connect with the walkers-askers against capital in Europe this summer. And of course we look to the deeply ingrained practice of councilism in the Kurdish movement in the terribly difficult conditions of their struggle. And beyond that, the millions of cracks in which people are trying to organize on an anti-hierarchical, mutually recognitive basis.
It is simply not true that the state is the only game in town. We must shout from the rooftops that there is another, long-established game: the game of doing things ourselves, collectively.
Organization in the communal or council tradition is not on the basis of selection-and-exclusion but on the basis of a coming-together of those who are there, whether in the village or the neighborhood or the factory, with all their differences, their squabbles, their madnesses, their meannesses, their shared interests and common concerns.
The organization is not instrumental: it is not designed as the best way of reaching a goal, for it is itself its own goal. It does not have a defined membership since its aim is to draw in, not to exclude. Its discussions are not aimed at defining the correct line, but at articulating and accommodating differences, at constructing here and now the mutual recognition that is negated by capitalism.
This does not mean a suppression of debate, but, on the contrary, a constant process of discussion and critique aimed not at eliminating or denouncing or labeling the opponent but at maintaining the creative tension that arises from holding together ideas that push in slightly different directions. An always difficult mutual recognizing of dignities that pull in different directions.
The council or commune is a movement of self-determination: through asking-listening-thinking we shall decide how we want the world to be, not by following the blind dictates of money and profit. And, perhaps more and more important, it is an assumption of our responsibility for shaping the future of human life.
If we reach the point of extinction, it will be of no help to say on the last day: “It is all the fault of the capitalists and their states.” No. It will be our fault if we do not break the power of money and take back from the state our responsibility for the future of human life.
John Holloway is a professor of sociology in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. His books include Change the World without Taking Power (Pluto Press, London, 2002, 2019) and Crack Capitalism(Pluto Press, London, 2010).
In this article the reader is offered a short narrative about the impending catastrophe linked to the use of fossil fuels.
Experiment in Madness
Imagine an airplane in an experiment set up by mad scientists. The plane has a limited amount of fuel, so must come down sooner or later. The mad scientists give the plane’s 1000 inhabitants money every minute the plane is in flight, paying more money the faster and the higher it goes. The money is allocated unevenly, with decisions made by those with the most money. So the 10 passengers who own 50% of the wealth pilot the plane, taking into consideration the ideas of the next wealthiest 90 passengers who own another 38%. The pilots ignore the 900 passengers who share the remaining 12% of the plane’s wealth. Happily, nearly everyone is excited for the plane to go as fast and high as possible, in hopes of increasing their earnings.
The pilots burn the jets at full speed with the plane angled up as far as possible without becoming destabilized. Though they realize the plane will soon run out of fuel and be stranded at high altitude, they expect to use the 10 parachutes on board to escape with their wealth before the plane hits the ground. Many of the less wealthy passengers are vaguely concerned, but don’t look at the instrument readings to understand the full situation. They trust that the pilots will devise a plan to avoid disaster while keeping the money coming.
A few passengers feel great alarm.
They estimate remaining fuel as barely sufficient to allow a safe landing if the plane begins immediate descent. They observe that the faster the plane flies, the faster these scant reserves are depleted, while the higher the plane gets, the more dangerous will be its descent. But the pilots seem intent on rocketing upwards until the plane is completely out of fuel and nearly uncontrollable.
The alarmists attempt to warn everyone of the looming danger, and a handful of other passengers stop competing for and counting their money long enough to hear what they’re saying. Though most of these quickly tune out the alarmists’ message (which isn’t nearly as interesting as money and what it can buy), a few grudgingly acknowledge that accelerating endlessly upwards might be a bad idea. But no one likes the idea of ending the joy ride by deliberately landing the plane, so there’s general mumbling about staying in flight forever by installing solar panels and wind turbines on the wings. (A physicist tries to point out that solar & wind can’t do more than keep the cabin lights on, but the mumblers raise their voices enough that they needn’t hear such pessimism.)
Some vow to voluntarily limit their share of income from the plane’s suicide path, then wander away to tend potted plants and meditate.
Meanwhile, the pilots ignore the chatter and stay on course. With no prospect of swaying the pilots through reason or of inspiring the passengers to wake and rise up, many of the alarmists succumb to despair or hedonism.
Finally, someone has the idea of cutting the fuel lines feeding the engines. Though it would be ideal if the pilots used the engines for a safe landing, their choice to use every bit of fuel to accelerate towards demise makes sabotaging the engines the next best option. The plane will at least stop gaining dangerous altitude, and will retain enough fuel to power critical systems with a backup generator.
How will this experiment end?
Will the plane’s riders go higher and faster for their largest payments yet, followed by a grisly crash killing not only them, but also ground-dwelling bystanders? Or will the saboteur cut the fuel lines in time for the passengers to break out of their hypnosis and glide the plane to an emergency landing?
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As the book Deep Green Resistance reminds us, there are certain aspects of collapse that are positive (declining oil demand, for example) and others that are negative (e.g., rising patriarchal, racist elements). This piece from Vince Emanuele argues that individualist survivalism is often an anti-social response to the social problems we are facing, and that we must organize as communities to survive.
“We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it… But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.”
Following the Great Recession of 2008, many of my friends started talking about “living off the land.” At the time, I didn’t give their words much thought. After all, Obama was in the White House; Neoliberalism was on the rise; imperial wars raged abroad, and the antiwar movement was falling apart.
During those dark and tumultuous years, my primary focus was building the sort of left institutions that could prevent the situation in which we now find ourselves: a nation on the brink of collapse, civil war, or some combination of the two. Sometime around 2010, I started reading about the connections between climate change and the U.S. empire and militarism, which led me to research and learn more about ecological devastation and biodiversity loss.
The global picture was much grimmer than I had imagined.
Not only was capitalism and empire destroying human life, but it was also destroying the planet. At that point, I began to better understand my friends’ urge to “move to the countryside,” but I didn’t agree with their vision. To me, it seemed like a uniquely white and middle to upper-middle-class thing to do. It also seemed like the easy way out.
I remember thinking, “I don’t know too many black or Hispanic people who are starting small farms.” And I still don’t. That’s not because they’re not interested in doing so. Black and Hispanic Americans simply don’t have the material resources to start small farms, which require land (money), equipment (money), time (money), specialized skills (access), and various other resources (money and access).
Plus, I don’t know too many black or Hispanic people who are champing at the bit to live in Southern Indiana, northern Wisconsin, or rural Montana, whereas many of my white friends wouldn’t blink an eye moving to those regions. And I sure as hell don’t know of any poor people who have the resources to do any of the above. They’re happy if they can go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant once a month.
If we’re genuinely interested in building multiracial coalitions of working-class people who are capable of combating capital, the military-industrial complex, corporate power, state repression, and rightwing nationalism, we can’t do it from the isolated countryside. We can’t do it from the safety of a family farm, totally detached from the day-to-day realities facing the very people, disproportionately black and Hispanic, but also poor whites, we need to build relationships with if we hope to win.
Urban communities, churches, schools, workplaces, bars, social and sporting clubs, recreational centers, community centers, and neighborhoods provide fertile organizing terrain for leftists. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 80% of Americans live in urban areas. By 2050, studies suggest that 66% of the global population will live in cities. Those numbers will only grow with time.
If you live in rural Iowa, you depend on people in New York City, Mexico City, and Tokyo.
You’re not some sort of lone-ranger-cowboy-farmer: you’re wholly dependent upon petroleum-based products, including everything from fertilizers and fuel to equipment and cleaning products. Multinational corporations produce those goods. International banks finance production. All of this requires international agreements, governments, legal apparatuses, and the like. Global supply chains provide your equipment. And the fuel that runs your equipment is extracted, refined, shipped, and distributed on a global scale. You’re not living a ‘sustainable life’ — you’re just as part of the global economic system as anyone else, hell, even more so than low-wage workers who live in cities.
Whoever controls the cities and, to some degree, the suburbs, will control the nation. Cities are the lifeblood of capitalism. Capital dwells in cities, not rural areas. Lockheed Martin depends on Wall Street. BP depends on Lockheed Martin. Corporate headquarters, executives, and lenders are located in cities. The bulk of their customers reside in cities. The economic activity that takes place in cities supports the flow of capital which facilitates capitalism.
Our enemies, both visible (corporations, governments, militarized police) and invisible (capital) reside in cities, not the countryside.
Furthermore, think about the past 20 years of social movements and political uprisings: the ‘Battle For Seattle’ (urban environment); the antiwar movement (largely based in urban environments); Occupy Wall Street (cities), the pro-union occupation in Madison, Wisconsin, (urban environment/college town), Black Lives Matter uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, (urban/suburban environment), and the current wave of Black Lives Matter uprisings, occupations, marches, and the like (yes, throughout the country, but primarily based in urban environments). The only notable exception is Standing Rock. Even the teachers’ strikes that swept the nation a few years ago were based in cities and suburban school districts. The same is true of insurgent socialist electoral campaigns.
At some point, I realized that many of the people, including my friends, who’ve moved to the countryside to start small farms aren’t interested in building political movements, fighting back against corporate and government power, or creating a better world. They’re interested in survival, yet they know nothing about survival. They didn’t grow up in the woods. They don’t live off the land. They use power tools. They use cars, and fuel, and technology, and all the rest. To the degree they’re able to “live off the land,” it’s only because modernity has allowed them to do so with minimal risk.
They believe, näively, that they can survive as a small family unit in a world of 7.8 billion people. They can’t even organize their family members or close friends to get on the same page, let alone function as a tribe or small community, yet they believe they’re going to live in some sort of self-sustainable fantasy land of yesteryear? It’s a joke, but it’s also dangerous.
The ‘back-to-the-land’ movement in the U.S. has a long history.
For the sake of time and courtesy, I won’t bore you by revisiting its history. In today’s context, however, the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement operates comfortably within the framework of Neoliberal ideology. Hyper-individualism is the religious dogma that fuels the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement. Only someone totally detached from the broader global community would be able to convince themselves that they can survive in this world with minimal social cooperation.
The same people who talk about ‘living off the land’ are the same people who say things like, “I’ve gotta look out for mine,” or “My family is the only thing that matters.” This parochial worldview is not uncommon in the U.S., especially since the Reagan Revolution. The Cult of Individuality infects virtually every aspect of modern U.S. culture, from politics and economics to sports, film, art, and social relations. This is evident when I see pictures of my friends hiding out in their quasi-secluded countryside homes, tending to chickens and growing tomatoes, while the country and world collapse in real-time.
Speaking of collapse, the people who think they’re going to hide out in relative safety as the world crumbles around them are so detached from reality that it’s hard to seriously consider where they’re coming from, but I’ll try.
Let’s say you live 60-120 miles outside a major city (this would apply to many of my friends in Northwest Indiana or Southwest Michigan who own property). If the economy collapses (due to any number of factors), or if the country devolves into a civil war, perhaps even a revolution, or a nuclear war, or a cataclysmic ecological disaster, you’re fucked. If cities become unlivable, you’re fucked. If suburbs become unlivable, you’re fucked.
You and the family are going to hunker down at the homestead, and the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who live within a week’s walk aren’t gonna discover your property? Oh, you have guns? So what? Have you ever used them in a combat situation? How often do you and your family drill? How often do you shoot? How big is your family? Big enough to fend off hoards of people traversing the countryside in search of food, shelter, and safety?
What are you going to do if we can’t stop governments (U.S., Israel, Pakistan, India) from triggering a nuclear conflict? As one Wired headline put it, “Even a Small Nuclear War Could Trigger a Global Apocalypse.’ You can’t stop nuclear wars from your chicken coup. You can’t stop nuclear wars with your daddy’s shotgun. You can’t stop nuclear wars with organic produce. And you can’t stop nuclear wars with gluten-free home-cooked bread.
Only internationally coordinated political campaigns and movements can stop a potential nuclear war.
What are you and your family going to do when tens of millions of Americans are migrating across the U.S. as a result of runaway climate change and rapidly changing weather patterns, ecologies, and natural landscapes? What’s your plan? To mow down thousands of people fleeing natural disasters? Is that how you want to live? Do you think they’re not going to shoot back? Do you think your property won’t, at some point, also become uninhabitable due to climate disaster?
My advice to people who think they’re going to survive a collapsing society? Take a flight to Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, then tell me about your absurd and childlike ‘collapse’ fantasies. Nothing is inspiring, humane, or decent about living in a fractured and crumbling society. The glorification of violence, destruction, and death in U.S. culture is, to say the least, quite disturbing. There’s nothing cool or sexy about banditry, religious mobs, sectarian violence, terrorism, torture, or wanton violence. Americans (mostly white people who grew up in the suburbs) hoping for collapse should spend more time in places that have experienced collapse. It’s not like the movies (or your imagination).
In the end, there’s no hiding from what’s coming.
Climate change is a global problem. Capitalism, the primary driver of climate change, is a global economic system. Each of us lives within its grips, unfortunately. The only way to stop or mitigate what’s coming is through collective action on a massive global scale. Either we make it out of this mess together, or none of us make it out alive. It’s that simple. Our collective challenges require national and international solidarity. We must build relationships, bonds, trust, and networks across geographical, ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries.
Regional or local solutions won’t suffice. Regional and local solutions will contribute, but we need an international vision to address 21st-century challenges. And that international vision won’t be cultivated by those living ‘off the grid.’ Any international vision worth considering must prioritize large-scale (global) projects. Large-scale solutions can only be developed democratically and equitably through collective decision-making processes that incorporate diverse political movements from around the globe.
I became a leftist because Marx’s and Engels’s writings, particularly those in the Communist Manifesto, resonated with me on a very deep level. Their writings didn’t encourage me to run away to the countryside and relive some sort of 18th-century ‘back-to-the-land’ fantasy. Their writings inspired me to build relationships and organize with working-class people around the globe in the hope that, someday, we will overthrow this terrible system (capitalism).
Today, we need a vision that’s inspiring, complex, and flexible (always willing to adapt to changing circumstances), but also principled.
Without a principled vision of how to proceed, we’ll continue to spin our tails resisting the latest excesses of capitalism, empire, or racism, without accomplishing much. People joined socialist and communist movements because those movements inspired poor and working-class people through ideology and action.
If our vision doesn’t include those who don’t have the means to escape ‘back-to-the-land,’ what sort of vision is it? The left should seek to include, not exclude, people. I’m not interested in building more walls (visible or invisible), internal borders, or tribal social relationships. The right does a fine job of inciting reactionary worldviews.
The left’s vision should be about more than simply surviving the coming storm. We need a vision that inspires and motivates people from around the world to join our movements, campaigns, and organizations. That can’t happen in seclusion. It can only happen through intentionally building broad, deep, and sustained social relationships with people from around the globe.
Vincent Emanuele writes for teleSUR English and lives in Michigan City, Indiana. He can be reached at vincent.emanuele333@gmail.com.
This article was originally published in Counter Punch on September 11, 2020. You can read the article here:
For this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Sergio Alexander Kochergin, a filmmaker, organizer, former U.S. Marine, and native of Ukraine. He did two deployments to Iraq in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and testified before members of Congress in 2008 as part of the new Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sergio lives in Michigan City, Indiana where he is the co-founder of Politics Art Roots Culture, or the PARC center, which is an event and community space.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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Trinity La Fey writes of sharing walls with abusers, of poverty and work, of finding radical feminism, and of navigating relationships in the midst of a patriarchal society.
By Trinity La Fey
Background is always tedious; I’ll try not to bore. Poverty, racism and sexism were not things I gradually discovered. I spent early years with a ranch-based family, that I had no idea I wasn’t related to, that called me their n!&*$r baby when I reflexively braided my hair into manageable bits. We were all pale as the moon, all American mixed. Their racism confused me because I knew that we were not 100% whatever white was. Children get it. Coming from ranch families that had the grandmother trauma of the depression made the family frugal to the point of neglect. The single man coming from this environment who was responsible for the lives of my brother and I was destitute. There was no one to mitigate his desperate rage and isolation, or inherited, old-timey sexism. We had the lot of landing with a genuine psychopath, but those circumstances would have pushed even the most outstanding person. Because the level of violence and impunity was so extreme, however, there was just no getting out of it (sane or otherwise) without putting a few things together, both about how social power works and the difference between self-discipline, or self-control and say, punishment or manipulation.
Having made it out early, I was also dubiously blessed with the rare experience of living for extended periods of time with all kinds of arrangements: all males, except me; all older women, except me; all women of mixed ages; mixed sexes of different ages; mixed sexes of the same age; and living alone.
When I was outed as a lesbian, at thirteen, it was the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Sure, I was a pariah and I walked down the overcrowded halls of my middle school with my hands frozen in dread that they might graze someone in a way that would make it worse, but I knew that what I felt with her was nothing like I could ever feel with a male, any male, ever. Lesbian. I describe my felling toward men at that time like the glazed eyes of a dead fish. Nothing. I had experienced men and boys and really tried (like a well-trained pretty, pretty, princess sex-kitten). They were just irredeemably disappointing. Same when you get a massage: a woman just knows where and how in a way that men cannot. I’ve no doubt it’s the same for men with men. Over time, maybe it was hormones, maybe it was predation’s flattering persistence, but I did get to finding some of them kind of cute again. I should’ve left it there. They rarely did me anything but harm. By the time I left Narcotics Anonymous, at seventeen, I’d put in eighteen months. By the time I was eighteen, I’d done pretty much everything there was to do out there, for a bookworm.
Poverty is a Wall
A big, big, big, big wall. Barely graduating in between my busy schedule of getting kicked out of places, I knew that I could not afford college, even as the elders that I loved did not. I came from depression trauma people. You never, ever get into debt. So I skipped it. I had been working, after all, since I could remember. I knew what I could make in my little food service wage job that I would feel stuck at until I risked leaving for a slightly less horrid wage job that would have its own special mindfuck lying in wait, until it went under, and over and over. Poor is something that cannot be explained. I was a pedestrian. Unless you have lived in America (not NY, NY) without a car, there can be no understanding. It changes your brain. Like working in service (particularly food service): if you haven’t done it out of need, you cannot know what it is to submit, in this way: to sacrifice pride and dignity while simultaneously pretending to keep face, for a living. It is true in a much more profound way when it comes to pornography and prostitution. There were moments during my time in the industry where I balked, when I wanted to quit and wasn’t able. Some coercion was external, but then sometimes my training just kicked in and stole the voice right out of me. That was not only true “professionally” I recognized.
When I fell in love, at eighteen, with a lesbian couple, there was a lot in the way. Falling in love is a real thing for me. At the time, I’d come from this Conversations With God kick, retrospectively for survival. I cultivated affections wherever I felt them, advocating for open relationships and demanding it in my own. By then, my partner was the guy who didn’t go to the strip club with the guys when they turned eighteen. I made it clear that I didn’t want children and that I would never marry. He agreed and we went on to have thirteen tumultuous years together that taught me three things: in America, if you care about the person that you are having sex with and they have no one else, you need medical access to them that you cannot get unless you are married; everything you do wrong in the beginning, your partner will do wrong in the middle, but if you handle that well, the ending may be prolonged; and, male culture is real and men hide it from women when we learn to see it, then attempt to silence women when we teach ourselves to talk about it. Even the cute ones. We had, none of the four of us, learned any of this yet. My love for this couple taught me so many things: even radicals are territorial; even women loving women can act out gendered violence; I am not immune to jealously; substance abuse is abuse and leads to abuse; and, women have trauma that men don’t have. Men’s dehumanization is sometimes complete even to themselves and still, as a class, there just isn’t the level of crazy-making bullshit for them to deal with all the goddamn time that will give them even the baseline female stress until they go to prison or war. I didn’t understand that when I was with girls, when we were only just beginning to process and experiment. Even with all that surviving girlhood cost, we still had hope kinda’. Now I got it: they were acting out their respective abuse with all the subtlety and skill of people who knew what they were doing. “I met her when I was seventeen, Trin.” one said to me, well on her way to a scene straight out of The Feminist Mystique. They definitely understood the master’s tools. We just didn’t know how to not use them.
The love and the shock, the violence of it coming this time so unexpectedly, the resignation, the loss and change demanded of all of us from that experience changed me in a way I didn’t know I could change again (but have come to appreciate will happen again and again). The other woman that survived that relationship is, I hear, happily married to a woman she loves and has (hopefully still) no warrants out for her arrest. I have fallen in love with no woman since. I thought, for a time, that it was protective, or somehow an unconscious choice I had made. After all, how could I not be attracted to women? It just never came to love again. I still love her and I know I always will: the kind of love no man can know. I know that we are better apart.
Then Came the Epiphanies
Things a self primed by Howard Zinn and Daniel Quinn could not anticipate. Another aspect of poverty, though not limited to it, is that of sharing walls with abusers. There was not a single building in which I lived (and I’ve lived in more than my share) where abuse did not occur. I remember so clearly the way it first came to me. I had tried everything: cops, social services, spells, yelling, inquisition, helpful offers, intrusion, song, shame, public letters. At each new space, an old option had been considered, tried and discarded. I was standing in front of a window, losing vision, hearing it fade, going still and numb as can happen. I saw an individual life’s accumulated sexual terror, like a ground zero, from which a golden-grey shockwave of mangled souls was spreading out past the horizon in all directions. Visions are hard to describe or convey, like books are to movies, but I understood something that all the violation I had seen and endured could not make me understand. The scope, the breadth of it was so vast, so deep, so impersonal that I finally got it. Then again with Darfur. Then again with human trafficking. Then again with Juarez. Then again with porn. Each next-day, ashen-faced me was an increasingly different person along a trajectory I could not see.
About halfway through my twenties, internet access was finally available to me in the home. It was a slow YouTube crawl (ongoing) to find my people, although I didn’t know at the time that’s what I was doing. I would’ve just said I was doing research, because sifting through the chaff factory that is the internet was very educational. Not bothering with social media, I came in with just enough immunity to not get too distracted. I’d been following the work of Chris Hedges (whose speeches are excellent background for me) for years by the time he gave me the gift. It was an interview with Lee Lakeman and Alice Lee during which he said, and I heard for the first time in my life, the name of Andrea Dworkin. A researcher oughtn’t need to be told twice. I listened to all of her available speeches. Then I read all of her non-fiction. Then the non-fiction of the other second and first wave women (still at it; what a library our forewomen have made!), whose lectures were oases of helpful vocabulary, theory and reassurance.
Maybe it was just my wyrd, but considering how deliberately I made my conscious choice, before I found radical feminism, to never be with another man, I suppose I should’ve seen him coming, but I didn’t. When I met my future husband, in my thirties, I had finally gotten access to some public assistance that had helped me get out of a situation. Invasive, humiliating, void of human consideration or respect for human dignity, the system was not a favored lifestyle choice. It was a double-bind between having my home invaded every six months, while being periodically psychologically terrorized, or, being consistently psychologically terrorized and periodically having my body invaded. I chose the former. I don’t know what it is like to be stigmatized for the color of my skin, but I do know what it is like to be dismissed as trash. When black women organized to talk about how they cannot afford to be separatists, I partially understand why. The men I have loved, who have also been discarded, are not people I am prepared to stop working or associating with because, on a practical level, we need each other. We physically, materially, cannot do without each other; we are often too weak of clout, even inside our own sex-castes, to have any longevity, let alone political voice. We die young, more often publicly and saddled with stigma rightfully belonging to The Bum on the Plush. When I fell in love with my future husband, it was not like anything I’d experienced. I had a vision. Radical feminism wasn’t on my radar yet and I honestly thought he was gay. He was too fully human. He still doesn’t understand what I mean. Those who know, know. The way I feel about him, the way he looks at me, the way I am made certain of his respect and admiration is something I know is rare and something I value and nothing I would sacrifice to any ideology. He is real to me back.
Rage is a Language Hard to Hear Through
If I had found radical feminism before meeting him, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. He would’ve been invisible to me and I would’ve forfeited all these glorious opportunities to be proven right or wrong about him, and men: to be disappointed and to be surprised. As it stood, we learned about it together. Though I carried all the initiative, he was a pretty good sport about being educated on the nature of his status as oppressor early on. Classic: I do all the work and he gets all the credit and praise for not throwing a tantrum at the suggestion of his need to change. We would watch Julie Bindel talk about how men can only be allies and he would just listen and accept. I would ask him for feedback and conversation and he would just listen and accept. The cop-outs didn’t take long to crop up; not everyone has the drive and stamina for this that I do. Even women. Still, I smell a cop-out and tend to pounce and so it was that I learned his limits as an ally and mine as an effective communicator. It is easy to say that it is not my responsibility to educate him, that we should’ve been important enough to warrant interest without coaxing, because that is true. It is also true that rage is a language hard to hear through. Like any female socialized into femininity, I have some pretty dysfunctional communication habits, especially around confrontation. Like I have specifically learned, I tend to go from Placation-Station to Gorgon with very little fair warning or opportunity given to make things right. How does anyone work with that? That is unworkable. This man seriously impresses me. I once saw him call a Coopers Hawk out of the sky. A wild one. He has my mother’s birthday. Day, not year. He is younger than I am. He scored a fucking zero to my full A.C.E. score. His experience of life is a mystery to me. I am infuriated by his lack of curiosity about me. He considers it respectful. When I tell him things, he listens and accepts. When I ask him things, he is afraid of me. He knows how I am. He doesn’t know that I understand that women are fully human in the worst ways too; that in our respective searches for the way, we have all done harm. We work on trusting each other to have these conversations. We both have messed that up too. We inch back toward it: the conversation.
By aligning with him in any way, I risk fundamentally in ways he will never be vulnerable to or fully understand. I married him and so forfeited my meager assistance for a much better deal. No more home invasions or periodic psychological terror, plus, I get to live with my best friend. But what about body invasion? Is it radical enough just to be able to ask the question? I would argue that you have to be able to ask the question and be able to say no. What about the patronization inherent in the very clear reality of my financial dependence? It affords me a better living situation and greater opportunity with more ease than I was able to scramble for myself. Must that not also mean that I will be less likely to risk his hatred or indifference? I would say fuckin’ please. Of course it does.
I decided that I would read Intercourse aloud to him, who has ADHD and cannot sit still for a second. After watching the panel Julia Long had put together of women speaking about it, I had some idea of what I was getting us into, but hadn’t read it yet. Whatever it was, we were going to do it together goddamnit. That’s when that magick started. He really started to annoy me. The cop-outs were a sharp noise to me now. Un-real dude. Now how are we gonna’ get anywhere if it’s like this? I would read a chapter and he would listen. I would try to get as many in as possible before he would beg off, my mouth dry and fumbling, not knowing when I’m going to get him back into a sitting position. It went on like that, passionate Andrea Dworkin chapter after disturbing chapter, until we hit the one. When I read The New Woman’s Broken Heart, the whole book was like that: there was a different person on the other side of that book, a more integrated, sober, resolute person. Just like all the other times, only this time. But every one of her books has a chapter that does that to me. When I got to that chapter for me in Intercourse, I could feel in the room how I was bigger, like I was filling up that whole room with my grief and recognition, like a radiant body whose skin stretches thin past the walls. I could feel him inside of that, bewildered and seeing me for the first time as I am and have been. He got it. Then forgot it. Because joy and enlightenment are fleeting and we have things to do, all of us. I get it.
Patriarchy: We Are Bound to Fail
But now, there is a frame of reference. Now there is, at least, some honesty and the conversation becomes possible. The question has been asked. He is not the only one who, from time to time, needs to be called out; neither is he the most frequent one to give feedback or the worst one at receiving it, between us. My idea and expression of sexuality changed dramatically with that book, as did his accordingly. How could they not? There had to be an accepted ‘no’ for the question to be real. When prodded for feedback about my decisions about what to build and what to destroy, he says he just accepts. He often has wisdom beyond me. I have feedback about everything.
Even though he wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d been ‘properly’ educated, I had to laugh when Germaine Greer called herself ‘incurably heterosexual’. Seriously, if there was a cure for love, I would have found it, before radical feminism, instead of my husband. For all the horror, it didn’t reveal any one atrocity so much as help to integrate my story into ours. With the assistance of this theoretical framework it is impossible to ignore my own glaring domestication in the lack of address I have to that second problematic certainty: ability by the grace of another is not true ability, financial or otherwise. I can do things he could never do (not just make babies). I know things he will never have the opportunity to know (besides cramps). Inside this patriarchal framework, we are bound to fail, to be subject to all the predictable pitfalls, to feel our way toward the conversation in the darkness. We can but do our best. He brings home more scrilla. I refuse to clean up after him. He insists on watching Steven Universe in the middle of the damn night and Golden Girls in the evening. I handle crises situations very well. He can take instruction very well in a crisis. I know that I put the light in his eyes. He will never be my political focus. I will always have to battle on the personal and political front with him as my partner. He is an ally I remain proud of.
