July 16th & 18th, 2024: Freedom is a constant struggle (Angela Davis)
“I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectives that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”
A: I connected most with this quote. It’s so easy to feel alone and hopeless.
B: The line “optimism of the will, and pessimism of the intellect” even acknowledges hopelessness - that you can be optimistic while simultaneously knowing that a lot of harm exists and will continue coming. I like this line of how optimism and pessimism can coexist, and do so in different planes of thought. In fact they have to coexist. The term “optimism” in and of itself requires there to be something harmful happening, or the concept wouldn’t exist. So its premise assumes grounds for pessimism too. The quote says both are valid and can be felt together.
C: I read somewhere that most people find it far easier to imagine the end of the world as we know it than a free world.
A: Cynicism tends to be associated with being rational and logical. But this isn’t a good association: basic knowledge of the history of successful human rights movements will immediately defeat this association. It is not factually true that the world is doomed and nothing can be done to better it as cynical people claim.
B: I’ve heard people say that it’s pointless to commit to liberation movements because I ‘won’t see an effect in my lifetime’. But an effect not occurring in my lifetime isn’t grounds to do nothing: there will still be people alive at some point, eventually, who will live its effects.
C: Yes, there is self-centeredness inherent in that argument. The argument is basically ‘do nothing because its benefits will not affect you’.
A: I like the emphasis on having community to feel hope. I was thinking: if you are in a community of like-minded people, what’s the difference between self-preservation and optimism? Do they merge? These kinds of echo chambers are good for stamina and hope.
“Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles. ”
A: I really like this one.
B: It’s completely true. We think about how to fix things to get a just world, not what the just world will actually look like and what it would be like to live in it.
C: In all the events across the encampments, there wasn’t much talk about what a free Palestine would look like.
A: A free Palestine can take on so many different forms. To envision it, we’d have to begin with some guiding principles for its existence and independence.
“The personal is political. There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions and struggles to reinvent our personal lives, and recraft ourselves. We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. Someone attacks us, verbally or otherwise, our response is what? A counterattack. The retributive impulses oft he state are inscribed in our very emotional responses. The political reproduces itself through the personal. This is a feminist insight - a Marxist-inflected feminist insight - that perhaps reveals some influence of Foucault. This is a feminist insight regarding the reproduction of the relations that enable something like the prison-industrial complex. ”
I: This is my favourite quote - initially, because I wasn’t sure if I agreed. It seemed too all-encompassing that every emotional response is a reflection of a larger, oppressive legal-political system. What happens to individuality? I believe in individuality. Don’t the origins of a behaviour matter more for an analysis of the personal being the political? If I “counterattack” against someone who is rude to me, my intention may not be that I want to punish them (like the prison industrial complex), but that I am self-empowering and standing my ground - this is not what the prison industrial complex is built on.
F: I guess it’s about self-awareness. The more self-aware you are about the origins of your thinking, the more consciously you can associate them with being aligned or not with larger oppressive social forces.
I: I thought perhaps thinking in other languages would help, because all words are loaded with connotation. Other languages allow you to escape those connotations.
“Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism? If one imagines these vast expressions of solidarity all over the world as being focused only on the fact that individual police officers were not prosecuted, it makes very little sense. I’m not suggesting that individuals should not be held accountable. Every individual who engages in such a violent act of racism, of terror, should be held accountable. But what I am saying is that we have to embrace projects that address the sociohistorical conditions that enable these acts. ”
D: I agree with this quote. Focusing on incarcerating individuals distracts from the roots of the systemic oppression that led the individuals to commit a crime.
A: I think that we should hold individuals accountable, but maybe we could follow incarcerations with legitimate discussions on the systems of oppression that underpinned why the crimes occurred.
B: Or we could find a way to implement systemic consequences that actually do address the roots of an oppressive system, instead of having consequences only on the individual level.
C: How would we identify the ‘roots of an oppressive system’? Let alone address them?
D: Probably begin with large-scale studies that can identify themes in why people commit crimes - maybe through interviews with people in prisons - and link those themes to the life conditions of those who were incarcerated. That’s a start. Then there could be policies implemented that attempt to alleviate those life conditions.
E: And we wait and see whether crime would then alleviate.
F: Exactly. While ensuring individual accountability in the meantime. But the individual accountability would be societally understood as an intermediate step, not a ‘victory’ or something that addressed the root of the issue.
H: That’s a good point. There are certainly a lot of individual incarcerations that are considered ‘victories’.
“While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to jesting the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism. ”
A: Hmm. I think that recognizing individual leaders is important because it brings a sense of community, hope, and optimism. And we discussed those traits as being really important for movements. For example, a lot of people feel immediately connected to each other if they share a profound connection to Nelson Mandela. Recognizing leaders of movements can give complete strangers who share histories and ideologies a sense of common identity and existence. There is profound peace in knowing that there is a leader representing them who is known on a global scale.
B: Yes. I also think, though, that elevating an individual risks dismissing the social context and the communities that gave that leader the stamina to do what they did. The social context and ‘leaders’ are inextricable. We can’t really single individuals out.
C: There is also the argument that society has to be ‘ready’ for a leader to unify communities. There are so many Palestinian intellectuals who have been imprisoned by the Israeli government and are unable to unite the masses for liberation work.
D: We’ll never know. We’ll never have access to an ‘alternate’ timeline where we can gauge what these individuals may have achieved had the social contexts changed.
E: I can think of some cases in the history of science where it seems starkly clear that individuals - rather than collective communities or social contexts - were really the ones who made a discovery. The mathematician Ramanujan, for example, had such keen insights about mathematical relationships even when he had no formal training. That’s an instance where we can’t attribute his contributions to social contexts. Some people are just ‘freaks of nature’. There are other cases, like Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that some scientists argue would have been discovered by someone at some point based on the way shared knowledge in the field was naturally growing. And indeed, some people say that theories shouldn’t be named after people because that undermines the importance of prior or simultaneously developing knowledge that led to that discovery. Maybe picking out scientific leaders is a good analogy for gauging how to identify ‘historical figures.’
D: It is a key part of historical methodology to identify ‘historical figures’ though.
E: Yes, I’m not saying that some people didn’t drive movements more than others. I just think that the status quo seems to be to emphasize individuals to the point that it denies the existence of the social contexts that sustained them.
F: I think it's important, too, to remember that historical figures known to the general public likely emerged through press or rigorous historical analyses that concluded they were more ‘important’. So I think that social contexts are prioritized - at least in historical methodology - to come to a conclusion about whether one individual contributed more to history than another. But by the time these history papers reach the general public through news and press, all we have is the conclusion that an individual is more important - not the analysis and nuances of why their contributions were uniquely important.
