Pamela's Blog 38

Published on Friday, July 17, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Embracing The Plural”

by Pamela Satterwhite

In Waking Up I argue that we are all complicit.

I believe embracing this truth advances us towards our future freedom without bosses in two ways:

First, because it is accurate, it helps us to not waste time with stances and strategies that go nowhere, or, worse, support the podrunk plan to keep us divided.

Second, it could help bring about the psychic healing necessary for us to care about each other, thereby releasing the love on which mass movements are fueled.

…going deeper…

The mental habit of contempt is the necessary psychic infrastructure for hierarchy. It is a deeply capitalist stratagem. It lies at the heart of their culture-annihilation projects and is essential to their plan to stay on top. Virginia Woolf attempted to guide us to this truth many decades ago:

The law of England sees to it that we do not inherit great possessions; the law of England denies us, and let us hope will long continue to deny us, the full stigma of nationality. Then we can scarcely doubt that our brothers will provide us for many centuries to come, as they have done for many centuries past, with what is so essential for sanity, and so invaluable in preventing the great modern sins of vanity, egotism, and megalomania – that is to say, ridicule, censure and contempt. (Three Guineas, p. 82)

Developing a mass movement is about tuning our minds, folding our thoughts and actions, together. Obviously if we have contempt for our neighbors, in proportion as we do we delay our future freedom. We cannot embody our future if we’re busy embodying capital. Somehow, we have to cultivate reverence for all capital has negated, consciously embrace those qualities from which we’ve been alienated.

Am I being obscure?

Let me be blunt.

Our solidarity must be with our brothers and sisters irrespective of whether or not they understand that the capitalist system is rigged for the few. This system is designed to fetter us with cons so it’s quite understandable that we’re all confused.

Rather than sneer at our psychically-ensnared neighbors (and if we look deeply enough within ourselves I think we’ll find the taint of capitalist non-caring there too), a much more politically astute and fruitful activity is…

…to organize…

…what that means specifically will be shaped by the earth and people where we live, but what it means generally is: thinking beyond the narrow cell of the self (one’s particular family or tribe) and giving to the earth and to the people around us…

…giving eggs if we have chickens…zucchinis if we have those…drums to children who need to beat them…films that bear witness to those made to feel invisible…

…truth must be as systematically cultivated as the cons.

Doing all this is difficult because resources are tight and we’ve been systematically turned against each other.

In conditions such as these we’re in, especially given how overworked and exhausted we are, it’s understandable that we who long for freedom turn inward to those that validate us, understandable that we protect ourselves by carving out manageable chunks of oppositional activity, understandable that we tell ourselves, “I can only do what I can do.”

This is true.

Unfortunately resources are going to get tighter still, due to the manufactured crises that have been in the oven for a while and are just about…done…

…so if we are ever to develop the mental habit of “each one free one”… “all of us or none”…

…it has to be now.

[Discussion continued in "Unplugging" and also in "Becoming The Function", which asks that all progressives take a lot more seriously the degree to which the very conditioning of 'the job' itself will always, necessarily, subvert our efforts to move beyond a system based in exploitation...

...move beyond it to a world that (at last) can relax in reverence. In Waking Up, "The Two Winds (Part 6)" I argued that "Marx appealed to our reasoning, but it's our hearts that are broken." Once, through our analysis, this conclusion is arrived at, it's incumbent on us to counter capital with what it negates.

We have to embrace what podrunks negate...heart, feeling, earth, art, poetry...tenderness.

What moves 'Resignation' to refuse?

We've been conned into believing that everything has a price and that everything is a commodity. It is "The Responsibility Of The 'Intellectual'" to show that this is not the case. Embracing the mystery (see "Becoming The Function") returns ourselves to ourselves...restores balance.]

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Pamela's Blog 38

Published on Friday, July 17, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Embracing The Plural”