Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

Hope in Dank Times: Thoughts of a Cincinnati Activist

The naming of the intolerable is itself hope. – John Berger

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said
is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express
themselves as we did. – Sophie Scholl, The White Rose Society

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From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, we are witnessing a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics. In recent months the US has moved decisively towards becoming an authoritarian kleptocracy, replete with a violent, vengeful new nationalism, and a renewed war on women and minorities. It is now clear this administration does not care about ordinary working people of any hue and that the administration is peopled by those who caused the 2008 financial crisis, which cost 8.7 million people their jobs and may have destroyed as much as 45 percent of the world's wealth.

And yet... as I write, thousands of people shut down the airports in major cities across the United States to protest the forcible deportation of Muslim citizens from seven nations by executive order of the new president. In Cincinnati, members of Black Lives Matter have joined with immigrant rights actvists, labor organizers, and those who attended the city's women's march to form new, lasting coalitions that not merely defend the most vulnerable members of our communities but also build forward towards alternatives to capitalist society. The fact remains that with the tyrant Trump in power we are seeing the erosion of basic liberal rights that took centuries of struggle to win, yet hope grows in the dark. Resistance is no longer an option, it is a necessity, but we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective.

I suspect we spend too much time worrying about the Presidency and Congress, sites of power we have little or no access to. What we ought to be doing is spending our time focusing on the sites of power we have ready and absolute access to: the street, the workplace, the school, the community, the classroom, the neighborhood. That’s where we ought to go.

We must create combative organizations with prefigured structures, ones that reject hierarchy and practice democracy. Furthermore, they must go beyond the workplace and enter the everyday lives of workers and their kin. Direct democracy is never going to be enough. We’ll still need representative institutions.

The difficulty of even attempting to draft an alternative to the existing system is symptomatic of a general political impasse.Issues of democratic content (what is to be done?) must take precedence over the fetishizing of democratic forms as solutions in their own right (how should we proceed?). As a matter of survival we need a grand collective refusal to conform to the rule of capital and, at the same time, a creation of something else, a self-determination. We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.

One of the political imperatives today is to break the spell of automatically endorsing the frame we limit ourselves with, to break out of the debilitating alternative of either we just directly endorse free market globalization or we make impossible promises about how to have one's cake and eat it, too, of how to combine globalization with social solidarity. As Martin Luther King pleaded in his letter from a Birmingham jail: if we sit back too long, justice delayed may become justice denied for yet another generation. On February 15, 2003, between 15 and 30 million people too to the streets in 800 cities around the world, representing the largest day of anti-war protests in world history, and all over the world right now many more people are protesting the Trump presidency. There are always simple alternatives at hand, e.g. ‘If this person is hungry and we have bread, we should share” or “If this person does not share their bread we should seize it in order to export it where there is a real need (rather than an ‘entitlement’).” The Bolsheviks were reported to have said in Russia in 1917 that “power was lying about in the streets,” and at recent Black Lives, antiTrump and international womens' protests we see equality made manifest through mobilization. This is what democracy looks like.

What reproduces capitalism in developed countries today is largely the fact that workers can keep most of their achievements if they do not protest or think too much about the suffering of countless others. To understand the world you need to feel like it can be changed. We must exemplify what we say we believe. To this extent we 'pre-figure' a possible future in the insatiable present. A set of words initially formulated by a committee supportive of Polish Solidarity, read: “Start doing the things you think should be done. Start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” It means taking initiative, refusing the safety of cover, and – although it’s taboo – thinking and fighting to win.

The kind of hope I wish to advocate comes when participation begins to generate a kinder public life, built on intrinsic values. As Nancy Fraser writes, “Absent a reinvention of public power, there is no hope of successfully addressing the ecological, economic, or social dimensions of crisis.” Participatory politics creates social solidarity while proposing and implementing a vision of a better world. Most importantly, it can appeal to anyone, whatever their prior affiliations might be. We cannot afford to accept that roughly 62 million Trump supporters are irredeemably bigoted because, if we do, there is no hope. We need to persuade these citizens that if we don’t let race-hatred break us up we can win and improve life for everyone. For this reason concepts like race ought to be a regular topic in every zine, newspaper; at every meeting; and in every organizing conversation. While multi-racial coalitions are best the white part of the coalition must be the responsibility of white organizers.

Already in projects like the McMicken FreeSpace we can see how to develop anti-racist, feminist initiatives into a wider social revival by creating “thick networks”: projects that proliferate, spawning further ventures and ideas that weren’t envisaged when they started.  They then begin to develop a dense, participatory culture – a society in movement – that becomes attractive and relevant to everyone rather than mostly to socially active people with time on their hands.

What makes movements a force is the deployment of a distinctive power that arises from the ability of angry and indignant people to at times defy the rules that usually ensure their cooperation and quiescence. Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to spark a general strike. They are also our best locus of hope. As many Americans are realizing, right now, resistance works. What will you do to fight back?