The Future as a Contested Space

or: we carry a new world in our hearts and other cliches I believe wholeheartedly

“You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That'€™s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

― Octave Mirbeau

An awful lot has been said and written about the assassination of a healthcare CEO last week. Ever since a suspect was arrested, an awful lot has been said and written about what we assume about the guy we assume did it. Maybe the best analysis I’ve seen has been by my coworker Robert Evans. More information will come out, and more will be said about that.

I don’t know that I have much to add about this specific action.

Last week, the authoritarian regime ruling Syria finally fell and Assad fled to Russia. The future of Syria is wildly uncertain and unstable, and already things are looking dark and messy. Both Israel and Turkey are looking to capitalize on the country’s weakened state to accomplish their own political aims in the area.

It’s easy, then, to look at the ousting of Bashar Al Assad as a bad thing, because bad things might come of it.

Easy, but not accurate.

Everything is an ebb and flow, always, throughout all of history. Every action we take will have knock-on effects, and most of those effects are unknowable (though we can and should always try to guess). Sometimes good things cause bad reaction… in fact, all good things cause bad reaction. That’s why most Leftists refer to right wing forces as “reactionary.” The right wing is, more times than not, the group that exists to defend the status quo. They act in reaction to how we act.

Whenever anyone takes a brave action, there are people waiting to blame that person for the reaction of, well, reactionary forces. It’s the “don’t piss off dad” of the political world: imagine two siblings with a dangerous, unhinged father. Both siblings are afraid of their father, but one chooses to act out, to yell back or hit back. This might make the father lash out at both children. The thing is… the father was going to lash out at some point or another anyway. You cannot claim that the child who chose to fight back was acting unethically.

I want to talk about the difference between judging an action ethically and judging it strategically.

Instead of blaming the reactionary force, people blame the person who tried to make things better, or stood up for themselves, or lashed out against oppression. This is, for lack of a better word, cowardice. It is submission. Or it’s being strategic.

All of us live, to some degree, in submission, in cowardice. Or we act strategically. All of us regularly, every moment of every day, choose to submit to, rather than defy authority. This is understandable, and perhaps even the best option, most of the time. We listen to our bosses because we need the money the job provides us. We say “yes sir” to the police because we don’t want to get shot. We pay rent, we pay insurance, we pay the taxes that arm a genocide overseas. We do a thousand little and big things to show our deference to power structures that rule us, because in our minds, doing those thousand little and big things is the better option.

We’re probably, usually, right. It’s probably more strategic to be deferential to cops, it’s probably more strategic to pay taxes. But we also get so used to that deference that it becomes habit. We become so certain we’re making the right decision strategically that we start to believe it is the right decision ethically. So when people act out, when they act in ways that we don’t consider strategic, we sometimes claim that those actions aren’t just unstrategic, but also unethical.

We should not confuse these things.

Frankly, we often get angry because we’re jealous. Each of us carries the weight of a thousand hypocrisies, and we’re jealous of the people who refuse, just for a moment, to live in fear, in submission, in hypocrisy. Most of us (myself included) long for a time when enough of us act together that we can forgo that hypocrisy. Most of us (myself included) long to be brave. We just want it to also be strategic.

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If someone acts in ways that I find unethical, I might seek to stop them, or to decry those actions. Radicals, revolutionaries, leftists, even anarchists have acted unethically here and there throughout history, and we ought, rightly, to speak out against those actions. We ought to dedicate ourselves to not replicating those actions. For me personally, the easiest example would be, well, how well we target any political violence.

The anarchist Malatesta once wrote: “We must do as the surgeon who cuts when he must, but avoids inflicting unnecessary suffering: in a word, we must be inspired by the sentiment of love for people, for all people.” I believe that.

In my research, I’ve run across at least three anarchist assassins and would-be assassins who have given their lives rather than risk killing innocents. Two different Italian men waited for weeks with bombs for a chance to kill Mussolini without harming anyone else, but were arrested before they had the chance to strike at the dictator… because, after all, there is simply no action more “authoritarian” than killing an innocent person.

Other people have not been so discerning. In one of the most despicable acts ever done under the name of anarchism, someone (probably a later-fascist-informant named Mario Buda) set off what might have been the world’s first car bomb on Wall Street in 1920, a horse drawn carriage with a hundred pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of metal weights for shrapnel. This murdered and injured children and low-ranking clerks and didn’t hurt a single CEO.

I don’t find it a coincidence that Mario Buda, after returning to Italy, eventually began informing on the anarchist movement to the Fascist government to save his own ass—and at one point foiled a plot against Mussolini’s life. Someone who has no qualms about “collateral damage” would naturally be drawn to fascism.

If someone acts unethically, we must of course decry that action.

In contrast, when someone acts unstrategically, we can critique the action, and try to do better ourselves and encourage others to do better in the future, but we cannot ethically condemn the action.

Every action has unintended consequences. Violent actions in particular are prone to causing unintended consequences. This does not make them unethical.

It was not unethical for people to overthrow the oppressive regime of Bashar Al Assad, come what may. And, frankly, very few people believe that it was unethical for someone to shoot a healthcare CEO who profits from the systemic murder of the sick.

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If there’s one thing the news of the past week has shown us, it’s that the future is a contested space. Certain things that felt impossible feel possible now. We are, to risk an overwrought metaphor, unmoored. The ship of politics has lifted anchor. Anything could happen. It is dangerous, and frightening, to be unmoored on the sea in a storm. The winds blow every direction, and it’s up to us to figure out how to rig the sails or whatever. Look I don’t know much about sailing. We’ve just got to get the boat in a good direction, and it’s actually possible now in a way that it didn’t used to be.

Crisis is opportunity.

The outbreak of the Syrian Civil War allowed the region most commonly referred to as Rojava to declare for Democratic Confederalism and work to build an imperfect, bottom-up pluralistic and feminist society. It’s one of the most exciting social experiments in history. They wouldn’t have had the chance if it weren’t for the crisis of the war.

Yet the precarious balance they’d found is now under threat because of foreign forces taking advantage of the collapse of the regime in Syria. Chaos allowed them to form, and now chaos threatens them. That’s what chaos does.

When I’m not sure how to feel about a political issue overseas, I tend to look to the anarchists local to that area and follow their lead. This method isn’t perfect, perhaps, but it has generally served me well. Tekosina Anarchist (anarchist struggle) is an anarchist unit fighting in the SDF, the military force that defends the region we usually call Rojava. And their statement from a week ago is cautious and nervous but not pessimistic. And it’s titled “We are Not Afraid of Ruins.”

This title is an excerpt from a quote regularly attributed to the anarchist general Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil War. There’s a good chance the quote is apocryphal, that it was written instead by a sympathetic journalist. But one nice thing about being an anarchist is that I never gave the quote specific weight based on it having been said by an “important” man. The full quote is this:

"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute"

The future, our future, is unwritten, but we know how to write. We will write that future together. If we’re all aboard that ship, cast about by the winds, we know how to rig the tack or row the oars or whatever (again, I’m not a sailor). We sail our way through the storm by doing what we know how to do best: we take care of each other. We build and reinforce structures of mutual aid. We refuse despair. We stubbornly look at the situations around us and determine how best to act, collectively or individually, to move the ship in the right direction.

We remember that “solidarity” can only exist between people with differences. It’s not “solidarity” to help your own immediate community, but instead when you help people you might disagree with or even dislike.

We work to build class consciousness, to help people from all walks of life realize that the middle class has more in common with the poor than it does with the rich. That rural workers and urban workers have more in common with each other than with the rich. That some people own things for a living and some people work for a living, and the people who own things for a living cannot be allowed to continue to own things for a living.

We work to remind people that their agency doesn’t begin or end at the ballot box.

We are blessed to live in uncertain times, when anything is possible. Terrible things are possible, to be sure. So are beautiful things. If you ask me, I suspect both will come to pass.