Freedom

Freedom

     by Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany

Capitalism reaches fulfillment when it sells communism as a commodity. Communism as a commodity spells the end of revolution.

—Byung-Chul Han

I’m a permaculturalist. And I became a permie in the first place because I wanted to break free from this culture.

To me, permaculture was and still is highly political. “Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening” is one of my favorite Bill Mollison quotes.

After all, what freedom can we have without subsistence, without having control over our most basic resources, our own food? “There is no sovereignty without food sovereignty,” said Native American activist John Mohawk.

I’ve been so ardent and naive. I thought that the permaculture-approach is so ingenious that it would become a mass-movement, indeed a quiet and peaceful revolution. It would free us from being dependent on the digital food they sell us in grocery stores nowadays, and from the wage economy at the same time, because we would build small, local food cooperatives that would all be sharing the surplus.

Unfortunately, time and experience shows that it’s not that easy.

One of my permaculture teachers, who taught me the concept of the food forest, often said: “I don’t understand what’s the problem for all these critical people. Nowadays, we have all the freedoms we want.” He also articulated a very strange notion about the future: “Once we have reached the number of 10 billion, human population growth will come to a halt. Thanks to Internet technology, humans will then all be connected and serve as the consciousness of planet earth.” Attendants hung on his lips when he said that, and while everybody else was amazed by this perspective of a golden future, I sat quietly, stunned.

I knew in my heart that he was wrong, but couldn’t articulate a sufficient answer to his statements back then.

It made me angry. How can one say that “we have all the freedoms we want,” while the air we need to breathe is being polluted, the greatest mass extinction in planetary history is happening, the climate is being destroyed, the oceans are vacuumed and filled with toxic garbage? In short: when the most basic functions of our planet to support life are being destroyed?

What about the freedom of having breathable air? What about the freedom of having a livable planet? What about the freedom of having a future?

I’ve given a lot of thought to his statements ever since, because they seem so appealing to many people. The Earth never supported more than 2 billion humans until Fritz Haber and Robert Bosch indeed broke the planetary boundaries with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. Nowadays, we are hopelessly overpopulated. So the number of 10 billion is purely random and nothing but magical thinking. The notion of Internet technology and humans as the consciousness of the planet is nothing more than a new fashion of the good old ideology of humans as the crown of creation. What about nature in this fantasy? With 10 billion (industrial) humans, there will hardly be anything left.

Everybody with a sane mind and a little understanding—especially a permie—should know that the trees, the fungi, the soil, the air, the water, the animals and so on, in short what we call nature, indeed is the consciousness of planet earth. Apparently, the manifest destiny of the technocrats is to eradicate what they perceive as primitive, raw, red in tooth and claw, wild and uncontrollable, and to replace nature with a “better” system of human technology.

Deconstructing that was the easy part. The hard part is his statement about freedom. With all this in mind, the primary question is: what does freedom mean for someone like him?

A friend of mine, who was lucky enough to hear Noam Chomsky speak live, told me that in the discussion after somebody asked the usual question: “What can we do about it?” Chomsky responded that he thinks this is a strange question. People from so-called developing countries would never ask such a question, only westerners, he stated. Apparently, third-world-people still have a clearer sense for suppression and cultures of resistance. “We should rather ask what we can’t do,” Chomsky said.

When I attended a talk by Rainer Mausfeld, of course someone asked the very same question. Mausfeld stated that this question shows how well the soft power techniques he’d been describing work. We can’t even imagine any form of resistance.

For more than a century, the political left’s analysis has been very clear: The suppression and exploitation of the poor (working class) by the rich (owning class), that is the very basis of capitalism, can only be solved by organized class struggle to come from the working class. This concept isn’t hard to understand. It is classic Marxism. But somehow, the ruling class has managed to completely eradicate it from the proletarian minds.

I’ve come across a lot more of what I like to call liberal lifestyle-activists. I understood that most permies chose permaculture not because they want a revolution (like I did), but because they want a more sustainable lifestyle for themselves. They believe that they are free, because they perceive their individualism and their freedom of choice as the greatest freedom, the greatest achievement of modernity. Being part of any group, class or movement is perceived as regressive. The notion of class struggle is so yesterday.

At the same time, they’re usually educated people, and they know that a lot of things are going badly wrong. But as liberals who are taking power out of the equation, and individualists lacking any concept of social group our class, they must take it all on themselves. “It is all of us who are causing the destruction,” they’d say.

As a result, the only thinkable form of political action are personal consumer choices. Buy organic soap and feel better.

A great example of this are vegans. No doubt that factory farming is horrible and has to stop. But as a lifestyle-activist, all you can do about it is to stop consuming meat. In your worldview, the problem can only be solved by everybody stopping eating meat.

For liberal lifestyle-activists, “having all the freedoms we want” can only mean the freedom to consume (or not consume) whatever we want, whenever we want, in any quality and quantity we want. This is the kind of “freedom” with which capitalism has hijacked us. If we can afford it, of course. But within neoliberal capitalist ideology, there is no such thing as a suppressed class. The poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough, or they are simply to stupid to sell themselves well enough.

“Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.”

Byung-Chul Han

For radicals, the question remains: Without the possibility of mass movements, how do we stop the destruction of the planet that is our only home?

For a new generation of serious activists who are tired of all that shit and ready to take action, DGR has the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy.

Soft Power

Soft Power

Featured image: Painting by Kaipo, age 4

    by Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany

Since the beginning of history, attempts have been made to develop power techniques with which our moral sensitivities can be undermined, so to speak, which activate less resistance in the people. These power techniques are now often referred to as soft power. Soft power is the full range of techniques to manipulate public opinion. Intermediaries for these forms of exercising power are supported   by foundations, think tanks, elite networks and lobby groups — in particular private and public media, schools and the entire education and training sector as well as the cultural industry. The effects of soft power techniques are largely invisible to the public, so protests against these forms of indoctrination are unlikely. Economic reasons speak in favor of primarily using soft power and refining and optimizing these technologies for manipulation purposes on the basis of scientific research of our cognitive and affective characteristics. This has happened over the past hundred years in a very systematic and consequential manner.

 —Rainer Mausfeld

Along with destroying livelihoods and community, one of the most important things our “culture” needs to do to function is the destruction of the self. Because if our very selfs wouldn’t have been destroyed, we wouldn’t put up with any of this shit. We wouldn’t go to work to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We wouldn’t let our world be destroyed by rich, pathological, insane men. We wouldn’t inflict daily violence, even if oftentimes in a quite “soft” form, on our own children.

Of course, the destruction of the self is a very long and painful process, and therefore has to start at an early age. Rainer Mausfeld, professor of psychology and cognition research at the Kiel University, stated that the term competence (or skill) is one of the most ideological inflicted terms of our time. “The question those in power have been asking,” Mausfeld says, “is ‘how do we disassemble the self of the individual into a bundle of skills.’” He also states that “School is the most important soft-power instrument of the state.”

After all, what children learn in school are skills and competences; at the very best   they would learn some form of social competence. What they don’t learn is to be a human being, to evolve, to think, to feel, to just be.

This concerns me a lot, because I’m the father of a little loving sunshine named Leonard, who will start attending school this summer.

When Leo started going to kindergarten, for me that started a process of remembering my own early childhood. I remembered how much I hated kindergarten as well as school,  and it got me thinking about these forms of soft power.

Leo’s kindergarten is indeed a very good one. It is one of the famous German “forest kindergartens,” which means that the kids will be outside in the forest all day. Still, we had to go through what they call acclimatization phase, because a child of three has to be accustomed to being left alone by its parents. During the two weeks of this phase, one of us had to stay with our son at the kindergarten, leaving now and then for a while to get him used to being without us.

So often I have seen little children cry, when his or her mother would hand him or her over to one of the preschool teachers and leave. “Don’t go mom, don’t leave me!” the little ones would scream in sheer panic. “I’m so sorry my little darling, I have to go to work” was the usual answer.

I live in a pretty decent social environment. Most of the middle-class people here are kind and gentle; they love their kids and care for them. Some of them even told me that it breaks their heart to leave them. But they have been conditioned–like all of us–to believe that this is the way things are.

One time a child, whose mom had just left with the usual explanation, cried and just wouldn’t stop.  Ian, who was at that time the oldest boy in kindergarten because he hasn’t been considered “ready” for school (seriously, who is?), commented with one of the smartest lines I’ve ever heard:

“We have to go to kindergarten because they have to go to work; If they don’t work, they won’t earn money; without money, they can’t buy groceries, and we’ll have to starve; starvation is worse than kindergarten.”

That morning I went home and cried. Seven year old Ian had just covered most of the internal violence of our culture in one sentence with a few semicolons.

Today, I had to wake Leo early at 6:00 in the morning, because I needed to bring him to his mom who would drive him to kindergarten. He hates to be woken up, as much as I did as a kid and still do. He was crying and resisting a lot. I hate it when I have to do this, because I know I’m inflicting a “soft” form of violence on him.

I love the quote by Smohalla, the Wanapum dreamer-prophet: “My young men shall never work, men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams.”

I indeed believe that it is very unhealthy to be woken up early on a regular basis, because natural cycles  of sleeping and dreaming are disturbed. That most of us have to get up early from an early age on, for kindergarten, school, work, is very bad for our mental health and therefore must be considered as part of the destruction of the self our “culture” is inflicting on us.

Usually, I wake him for kindergarten as late as possible. With everybody busy working, there is no community and no kids to play with in the neighborhood. This is the reason I want him to attend, because kindergarten is the only chance for him to regularly get in contact with other kids and gain some social competence.

We’ve had some meetings at the elementary school he’ll attend. I went there with him, and we stood with a bunch of kids from different kindergartens waiting for the teacher, with school kids playing around us. “Class 2b, to the classroom!” a teacher shouted. Immediately, about 25 children would run after her. It is amazing, I thought, how they are conditioned at a very young age to follow military-style orders.

Our teacher came and called us to follow her to the gym. At the door, she took Leo’s hand, smiled at me and said: “Daddy is going to wait outside.” While everybody else went in, I was the only one who had to stay in the cold schoolyard. After a short startling moment I understood. I’d been the only parent, while all others where preschool teachers.

The system needs to separate us very early, to destroy the strongest bonds of relationships, to make us weak and compliant. Of course, most of the teachers are nice and well-meaning people, at least at the elementary school near where I live.  But they’ve gone through the very same process of conditioning. They learned that the most important thing is to follow orders. And that is what they do. Especially here in Germany, we should know that this in itself is very, very dangerous.

It terrifies me.

“Indian children are never alone. They are always surrounded by grandparents, uncles, cousins, relatives of all kinds, who fondle the kids, sing to them, tell them stories. If the parents go someplace, the kids go along,” said John (Fire) Lame Deer. Schools have been used in the US in a systematic and fierce way to destroy the kind of community Lame Deer describes. Of course, school has been much harder for them then it is for us civilized people. One reason for this is racism, another the systematic destruction of their native languages, that was largely done through school. But it is also because they just weren’t used to it. That time, they still knew how freedom and genuine community feels like. They still had something that we’ve lost long ago.

I’ve been asking myself why school is taking so long. I attended school for 12 painful years, and seriously, most of the time was wasted. Learning to read and write is not that hard; neither is learning some basic math. There are thousands of great books out there that cover much more than the things they teach you in school. Any average intelligent person could prepare for graduation in one or two years.

So, why all the wasted time?

Because the function of the school system is, first and foremost, to condition us with the experience that our lifetime doesn’t belong to us, but to a system. We have to be conditioned to sell eight hours or even more of our lifetime each day. We have to be conditioned, and broken, to identify with the company we work for instead of identifying with a community of family and friends, or even the land.

This is why they destroy all of it. The community, the land, and even the self.

Otherwise, we’d never put up with any of that shit. We’d resist, just like the American Indians did, until death.

 

Book Excerpt: Responsibility, Morals, and Values

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “Culture of Resistance” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet.  This book is now available for free online.

     by Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance

The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.

Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.

Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.

It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.

The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.

We can begin by picking up the pieces of community and civic life in the US. People of my parent’s generation are correct to mourn the loss of the community trust and participation that they once experienced. And as Robert Putnam makes clear in his book on the subject, Bowling Alone, social trust is linked to both civic and political participation in ways that are mutually reinforcing—or mutually reducing. My mother and her friends have the addresses of their state and federal congress-people memorized. Twenty years behind them, I at least know their names. And the current college-aged generation? They explain earnestly how the government works: “The President tells Congress what to do, and Congress tells the Supreme Court what to do.” In two generations, there goes every advance since Magna Carta.

We’re getting stupider, crueler, and more depressed by the minute. Oliver James calls the values of the corporate media “Affluenza,” likening it to a virus that spreads across societies. He points out that anxiety, depression, and addiction rise in direct proportion to the inequity in a country. The values required to institutionalize inequality are values that are destructive to human happiness and human community. Injustice requires reducing people—including ourselves—to “manipulable commodities.”74 James writes, “Intimacy is destroyed if you regard another person as an object to be manipulated to serve your ends, whether at work or at play.… This leaves you feeling lonely and craving emotional contact, vulnerable to depression.”75

How did this happen? When did people stop caring? One insight of Marxist cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci is that in order for oppression to function smoothly, ideology must be transferred from the oppressors to the oppressed. They can’t stand over us all with guns twenty-four hours a day. This transfer must be consensual and actively embraced to work on a society-wide scale. If the dominant class can make the ideology pleasurable, so much the better. Nothing could have done the job better than the passivity-inducing, addictive, and isolating technologies of first television and then the Internet.

Corporations have managed to coerce a huge percentage of the population into abandoning the values and behaviors that make people happy—to act against our own interests by instilling in us a new mythos and a set of compulsive behaviors. There is no question that television and other mass media are addictive, leading to “habituation, desensitization, satiation, and an increasing level of arousal … required to maintain satisfaction.”76 Clearly, there is an intense short-term pleasure capturing people, because the long-term losses are tremendous. Literally thousands of studies have documented television’s damage to children; indeed, a coalition of professional groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, put out a joint report in 2000 declaring media violence a serious public health issue to children, with effects that are “measurable and long-lasting.”77 The American Academy of Pediatrics reports, “Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.”78 The most chilling studies link television to teen depression, eating disorders, and suicide. If the destruction of our young isn’t enough to get us to fight back, what will be? As a culture, we are actively handing over the young to be socialized by corporate America in a set of values that are essentially amoral. The average child will spend 2,000 hours with her parents and 40,000 hours with the mass media. Why even bother to have children?

If culture is a set of stories we collectively tell, the stories have now been reduced to the sound bites of profit, offered up in a tantalizing, addictive flash that barricades access to our selves, if not our souls. Writes Maggie Jackson, “The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress.”79 For the young, those barricades may be permanent. Children need to experience bonding or they will end up with personality disorders, living as narcissists, borderlines, and sociopaths. They must learn basic values like compassion, generosity, and duty to become functioning members of society. They must have brains that can learn, contemplate, and question in order to have both a rich internal life and to have something to offer as participants in a democracy. For the developing child, bonding, values, and expectations create neurologic patterns that last a lifetime. Their absence leaves voids that can never be filled. The brain gets one opportunity to build itself, and only one.

The job of a parent is to socialize the young. Until recently, parents and children were nestled inside a larger social system with the same basic values taught at home. Now, parents are being told to “protect” their kids from the culture at large—a task that cannot be done. Society is where we all live, unless you want to move to Antarctica. Even if you managed to keep the worst excesses of consumerist, violent, and misogynist elements out of your child’s immediate environment, the child still has to leave the house. If the culture is so toxic that we can’t entrust our children to it, we need to change the culture.

The values taught by the mass media encourage the worst in human beings. If people are objects, neither intimacy nor community are possible. If image is all we are, we will always need to be on display. Social invisibility is a kind of death to social creatures. We buy more and more, whether higher-status cars or lower-cut jeans, so that we can have a better shot at being noticed as the object du jour. People surrounded by a culture of mass images experience themselves and the world as depersonalized, distant, and fractured. This is the psychological profile of PTSD. Add to that the sexual objectification and degradation of those images, and you have girls presenting with PTSD symptoms with no history of abuse.80 The culture itself has become the perpetrator.

Yes, we can try to inoculate ourselves and our children against the mass media, both its messages and its processes. But why should anyone need to be protected from the culture in which they live? And what good are all your heartfelt conversations and empowering feminist fairy tales when your girl child is surrounded by people who are not fans of Gaia Girls, but Girls Gone Wild?

As Pat Murphy bravely writes,

Suggesting that media is in general harmful and should be eliminated (or a dramatic reduction in the time spent imbibing it) at first seems absurd. But it is no more absurd than suggesting the age of oil and other fossil fuels is over. Media, energy and corporate control have evolved together. We need different concepts and new world views to transition away from fossil fuels and its infrastructure of corporations (including those of the media).81

Again, the right does not have a monopoly on values. We can reject authoritarianism, conformity, social hierarchy, anti-intellectualism, and religious fundamentalism. We can defend equality, justice, compassion, intellectual engagement, civic responsibility, and even love against the corporate jihad. We have to.

Indirect Support for Action

Indirect Support for Action

Featured image: Army personnel assigned to Bravo Company, 121st Combat Support Hospital, based out of Camp. When one cannot go to support an action directly, how can one still support that action?

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s talk, which you can view on Deep Green Video.

     by Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance  

Napoleon, or maybe it was Frederick the Great, famously commented that an army marches on its stomach. The quartermasters are just as important as the soldiers. In World War II battles, only about 10% of the soldiers ever fired the gun in battle. Most soldiers were clerks, truck drivers, people who delivered munitions, medics, or cooks. That is a pretty common figure: about 10%, often less. Only about 3% of the IRA ever picked up weapons.

Consider a professional basketball or baseball team. You not only have the players; you’ve got all the minor leaguers, coaches, trainers, dietitians, people who sell tickets, and groundskeepers.

A movie does not just consist of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There are gaffers and best boys and stunt people and editors and caterers. There are very few accomplishments that people actually do solo.

Most of us require support in whatever we are doing, and that support work is just as important as the more glorious aspects. My friend Lierre Keith often says that an activist movement needs two things: loyalty and material support.

For example, right now there are indigenous people and some non-indigenous supporters opposing a pipeline going across their land (of course every pipeline goes across indigenous land, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment). For those who, for any number of reasons, cannot be there  physically, there are a near-infinite number of things they can do. They can write letters to the editor locally, they can advocate in one way or another for them, they can send them supplies. The people on the front lines still need to eat and they are going to have shoes that fall apart; they’re going to tear a hole in their jeans or they’re going to get sick.

When we were attempting to stop timber sales, we would sometimes have to work very hard to meet a deadline. We would have until midnight to finish our appeal. We would oftentimes be working as hard as we could for hours and hours on this thing; we’d only have two hours left to go and we were really hungry, so somebody had to go get some food. That‘s just as important as the person who drives to the post office, just as important as the person who writes it. Physical, material support is very important. You need to develop support among the people in order to have a guerrilla army. That’s also true of activism. We need to raise public support for our positions.

In “Second Person Experiment” researchers had a bunch of people sitting in a room and then have a couple of people come in. One person would, for example, say something very racist. (They wouldn’t believe it, they would just say it as part of the experiment.) They found that the response of everybody else in the room was very heavily influenced by the response of the second person.

Let’s say the first person says something really racist and the second person says, “Hey yeah, it’s pretty funny, that’s great.” Everybody else in the room is much more likely to respond positively, than if the second person says, “That’s not really very cool.” That just came up in a very small way  this past week.

I’m on a neighborhood watch email list where they announce when somebody gets their house burgled or something. That’s pretty handy. But another thing that the people running the list do, which kind of annoys me, is they will complain every time anybody in the neighborhood sees a mountain lion or a bear. They will say, “We need to call Fish and Game and get rid of the animals, because the mountain lion was seen carrying a gray kitty.” They’ve been doing this a lot and I kept silent, but finally I just couldn’t take it anymore and wrote a very nice note: “We need to remember that we’re in their homes, and if you have a cat and you let the cat outside, that’s the risk you’re taking. The mountain lion or the bear should not be harmed because of a risk that you took and that your cat took (never mind that cats kill birds, we’ll leave that aside).” This is a very nice note, but it had to be said.

It‘s the same on the larger scale. The line by Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” is awfully simplified, but it is really true that somebody has to go out and say something. And then somebody else has to repeat it again and again until it starts gaining a cultural currency.

In terms of the attempts to support the indigenous people opposing the pipeline, if they had 50,000 people show up, that would be great—but if that 50,000 people showed up and they had nobody show up with food, this 50,000-people-thing would last about six hours and leave a mess. You need the support in order to have a long-term campaign. That’s just as crucial as anything else.

I have a friend who is an accountant. As part of her activist work, she does accounting for various organizations. That’s something you have to do too, especially if you’re having a non-profit. You have to have somebody who can navigate that territory. I don’t care what your skills are. If you’re a good writer, they need writers; if you’re a good cook, they need good cooks; if you’re a good accountant, they need good accountants. I get so tired of being called the“violence guy” because I talk about resistance, but the truth is: We need everything. We need school teachers, we need accountants, we need cooks. We need everything.

I want to challenge everybody who’s reading this to take at least one hour every week and do some form of activism or support for somebody else’s activism. This is how I got started as an activist. When I was about 24, 25 or 26, I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline. I wasn’t covering the social and economic costs. So every time I would buy gas, I was going to donate a dollar for every dollar I spent on gas to a local environmental organization. But I didn’t have any money because I was unemployed.  So what I would do instead is give myself a choice: either pay a dollar for every dollar of gas, or pay myself five bucks an hour to do activism. If I spent ten bucks on gas, I would either give ten bucks to a local organization, or I would do two hours of activism.

I challenge everybody to do that: take some amount and either tithe $10 a week to some local organization, or do two hours of work for a local organization. I don’t care how busy you are, everybody can take one hour away from their life. Write a letter, go to a protest, help start assembling a package. You can do just that much to start. It’s a wonderful start.

I Write What I Like: The Legacy of Steve Biko and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

I Write What I Like: The Legacy of Steve Biko and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

     by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance

“Deep down, every liberationist is an optimist.” – Steve Biko

Steve Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist and organizer who was murdered by the secret police in 1978. He was 32 years old when he was tortured and beaten, resulting in his death. “I Write What I Like” is a collection of writing by Biko and includes some commentary.

The collection is defined by radicalism. Biko was a believer in the mantra that freedom cannot be given, only taken. In this idea lies the core of why the liberal solution to South African apartheid remained incomplete, resulting in a highly unequal, racialized capitalist society. This is the difference between “equality” under the law and true liberation.

Biko understood that racism and apartheid were not simply technical problems. “One needs to understand the basics before setting up a remedy,” he writes. “A number of organizations now currently ‘fighting against apartheid’ are working on an oversimplified premise. They have taken a brief look at what is, and have diagnosed the problem incorrectly. They have almost completely forgotten about the side effects and have not even considered the root cause. Hence whatever is improved as a remedy will hardly cure the condition.”

Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness was built on undermining both the political structures that upheld apartheid as well as the internalized inferiority and superiority that still characterize race relations in many locations worldwide. He rejected integration for its own sake, recognizing that mainstream integration ideas are “white man’s integration—an integration based on exploitative values. It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to white values… these are the concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s [sic] mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-Cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”

He aimed to uphold African cultural values as important, writing “The easiness with which Africans communicate with each other is not forced by authority but is inherent in the make-up of African people… this is a manifestation of the interrelationship between man and man [sic] in the black world as opposed to the highly impersonal world in which Whitey lives.”

He understood that oppressive systems maintain their power primarily by the consent of the oppressed, which is gained via coercion, psychological tricks, propaganda, fear, and so on.

This is the reason that Biko was confident in the ability of non-violent aboveground political organizing to liberate South Africa. He was not a pacifist, and spoke in favor of the militant organizations (ANC and the PAC) that operated underground during his most active years.

These organizations had limited effectiveness in that context, but Biko strove to forge multi-generational alliances regardless, recognizing the primacy of shared goals. His approach to other groups was “tough, even aggressive language” tempered “with a basically friendly underlying spirit.”

Biko was a leader, but not an authoritarian. He promoted initiative rather than centralization. This proved to be key when many figures within various resistance movements were banned from participation in public life or sent to prison on the remote Robben Island.

He was a highly effective organizer, as one passage from his friend Aelred Stubbs C.R. makes clear. “Although Steve could hold no office in BPC because of his banning order he was constantly being consulted. It was amazing how much he knew… more than once he warned me not to get too close to certain people, white or black, whose contacts were less than desirable. He was always right. He never spoke against anyone if he could possibly help it. Even when he did, it was always in a particular context… There was this fierce integrity about them all. If you were with them you were in, and everything was given and taken. If in any way you were furthering your own ends, or trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, you were out.”

Biko, like all historical figures, was no saint. His behavior was frequently sexist, and he derided feminism as an irrelevance—not an uncommon attitude at the time (or today), but inexcusable in someone fighting for justice. Like with other historical figures, we can learn from his weaknesses as well as his strength. In 2018, those lessons are still as relevant as ever.