"Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck." – Jonathan Feldman
If you accept that the current trajectory of our civilization is deplorable and unsustainable, then it follows that you are concerned with what must replace it. Our ever-creeping global corporatism has proven exploitative and destructive, state communism revealed itself as an iron-fisted slave driver, and American libertarianism envisions an economy without regard to natural capital or human dignity, except for when they generate private profits. The American "left" is pitifully organized where it exists – totally fragmented, even – and financially bankrupt. With the walls closing in, it appears there is nowhere real to turn.
When it comes to our elected officials, the reality is that nearly every mainstream politician in the U.S. government could be reasonably considered center to far right authoritarians, freedom-wrapped rhetoric notwithstanding. A simple exercise on The Political Compass demonstrates that the senatorial delegations of all 50 states fit neatly into the "right-wing" and "authoritarian" quadrant, so even the so-called progressives will do little but offer watered down reforms that never see the president's desk. The climate is such that even tepid social democrat Bernie Sanders was sabotaged at every turn of the primary election by the immense influence of the Democratic National Convention and the Clinton Democrats. The current political and economic establishment are so well ingrained in our globalized society that overthrowing it through the national ballot box is not a realistic solution. Sorry, Green Party fans.
Figure 1: Some of the most progressive (New Jersey, Vermont, Washington) and conservative (Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina) Senate delegations in the U.S. Notice that all fit squarely in the top right quadrant of the compass; that's the complete range of official American political thought.
It is easy in this situation to seek refuge in a cozy living room, but human progress does not come from a couch. While the time for leisure is an important and, indeed, a central part of a full and complete human life, we must not allow our considerable material comforts – those of us who are fortunate enough to have them – to distract us from the struggle for emancipation. Wherever hunger and poverty exist they dissolve community. Electoral politics and republican governance will not deliver us from the constant degradation of human dignity. Instead, we must look inside ourselves, change our habits, and bind together with one another to build an alternative economy and egalitarian community. Simultaneously, we must join together with other revolutionists to tear down the institutions that pervade and dominate our daily lives.
We might be tempted to ask "what, exactly, does that look like?"
"At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the means of life," Murray Bookchin writes in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. "It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at decisions that affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary thought is to be taken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the problems and forms of social management."
Bookchin's book concludes with a section entitled Forms of Freedom, which examines historical examples of radical organizing from Ancient Greece to revolutionary Paris. As we explore together some of these forms, from the Rojavan cantons of Syria to the lands of Damanhur, it is important to keep in mind that true freedom has many faces. No single ideology can embody freedom; in fact, to submit to a rigid school of thought, be it Marxist-Leninism or that of state capitalism, is the antithesis of liberated thought. We must be willing to explore directly democratic, shapeshifting forms of organizing daily life if we are to truly become free people. The statement "all politics is local" should be a guiding principle, for it is in each of our day-to-day lives as individuals that we will begin to find a better way.
Remain unbounded, friends.
This week's musical guest is Mischief Brew with the emancipatory celebration Banks of Marble. In memory of the late Erik Petersen, may this music give you hope and resolution?
