Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Disempowerment can also be like a wind that knows no borders. It can start in your work life and blow through your family life and school life and spiritual life and community life and artistic / scientific life. Being told you’re a slave is a message that tends to pollute every part of you.

When we embrace our art fully we name ourselves.

Large, life-and-death decisions occur all the time on a job site, but what struck me most when I first starting working in construction was the everyday fellowship. …I’m a black woman in a racist world, so believe me, if I received its’ warmth, it’s a safe conclusion to say that the fellowship of working communally with one’s hands is a potent force.

No matter how much the podrunks propagandize that we must atomize every fucking thing, nature is a whole that generates wholes, and we are nature.

This explains what as young people we puzzle over when presented with the state’s obsession with issues like abortion, prostitution, marijuana, euthanasia – each new generation must be trained and retrained to accept the state’s administration of our bodies.

But it really makes no sense to us, despite all the propaganda, because our bodies cannot, in actuality – in reality – belong to anyone but us. So as youth we ask, with wrinkled brow, “why does the state care?”

The state cares because controlling us starts with controlling our bodies. Because if we listened to our bodies, if we loved them, if we put them first and took care of them, if we fiercely defended our bodies as our own, would we pollute our lungs with car.exhaust and concrete dust? Would we go down into the coal mines? Would we sit all day in front of computer terminals? Would we forfeit our dreams? Would we let them concrete over our earth and deny us the smell of forest, the sound of silence, the uncorrupted view of stars, the friendship of the other animals, the knowledge of their ways, and the ways of the plants?

Would we?

Would we put up with being divided from each other? With isolation? With the diminishment of our lives? Would we accept the boredom? Would we accept not starting and ending and punctuating each day with song and dance…and laughter?

What would it take to get back what’s been stolen?

Wouldn’t we have to have each others’ backs? Have our own things? Make our own things? Name ourselves?

But that’s ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ is having back-up, and ‘honey,’ and ‘wholeness,’ and ‘freedom’ – and continuity.

We develop culture to provide continuity and security to ourselves and to children – to pass on what we’ve learned, and to enable children to understand the world, and find their place in it.

Culture means children have sound, stable roots of our own creation. It interprets our link to the ancestors, the earth, and to each other. It provides answers to the basic questions that then free us up to ask the bigger questions. It allows us to pursue our biological destiny: freedom and joy.

Once you decide to reclaim the administration of your own body, and ignore the state, and organize with others who feel the same, you butt hard up against the reality that the state views you as subject, that your very existence is conditioned by the control and whim of the state, that the state views us as its personal administered property. Don’t you see the tattoo on your balls? Don’t you feel the burning there beneath your pubic hair?
Doesn’t it sting when they pull our strings?

“Free is how you is from the start, an’ when it look different you got to move, just move, an’ when you movin’ say that is a natural freedom make you move.”

But if you join with others while you’re movin’, expect the full weight of the state on your ass.

I envisioned our being not a gang in the customary sense, but an unstoppable force that no gang in Los Angeles or the world could ever defeat. …The reputation of a black gang was usually built on its use of pugilistic skills against its rivals. Toting a gun wasn’t our style, but we were getting shot at too often. One day after we had left a Jackson Five concert at the Los Angeles Forum, we mobbed our opposition of more than forty leather.coats, and then Crip-walked down Manchester Boulevard en masse, more than one hundred strong. (Stanley Tookie Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, p. 86, 93)

Picture that for a minute.

Uh huh.
Any wonder the police never let up ‘til they got him in a box he couldn’t get out of?
(What difference does a book make? I expect we’ll find out.)

Ironically enough, Stanley Tookie Williams joined with Raymond Washington to form the Crips because he wanted to protect his family and friends from gangs, and he was a natural leader:

“The moment I stepped to the forefront, it was a position I would not relinquish.”

As many observers and students of ‘Power’ before him have noted, the mindset of ‘Power’ offers only two options:

As a member of the black male species living in a ghetto microcosm, circumstances dictated that I be either prey or predator. It didn’t require deep reflection to determine which of the two I preferred. (p. 21)

No indeed – but what an unfair choice to give to our children. It was forced on Stanley when he was only a child – a brilliant student with no one to teach him what he was up against, and why.

The absolute brutality of this system – that we’ve given our children up to – has been disguised by keeping us atomized, separate from each other, divided against ourselves – seeing only the ladder but not the trapdoors (which we believe are for others, never for ourselves, until we fall through one). We are divided, not just race against race, or even male against female…but – worst of all to contemplate – parent against child. When we burden our children with a confusing, cruel ‘love,’ we shackle them for life. What a gift, so casually and unconsciously given, to a system for which we’re not so much doormat as dirt.

My mother adhered religiously to the Judeo-Christian Bible, in particular Proverb 13:24: “He who spareth his rod hateth his son. But he that loveth him chastiseth him betimes (whips him quickly).” Yes, my mother loved me deeply, and I regularly felt her love’s sting. But compared to the beatings some of my friends received from their parents, I got off easy. I will admit the biblically-inspired beatings did make me tougher. On the other hand, her punishments failed to derail my misbehavior.
The frequency of beatings aged me considerably. I became more unruly, distant, and indifferent to the predictable consequence of my actions…My mother…was in thrall to some handed-down black rendition of a Euro-American parenting philosophy that was in total conflict with the environment I saw around me and its stringent requirements for survival…
As a boy, I was incapable of articulating the contradictions I saw, or to dodge confrontations with the ominous influences outside my home. (p. 4, 14)

– and in it.
In Beyond Power, Marilyn French describes “the murder of children by fathers” as “the fundamental step in establishing patriarchy,” arguing that the worst consequence of sexism – using the colonizer / colonized analogy – is the internalization of patriarchal values on the part of women, the most basic, or original, one being the absolute right to dispose of children as one wishes; or, worse, an actual patriarchal imperative to annihilate the child.

When we internalize podrunk ‘values,’ unconsciously we’re doing the ‘Division Work’ that the podrunks depend on us to do. It’s the opposite of the ‘Culture Work’ that we must begin to do for ourselves.

We’re conditioned to both make too much and too little of ‘culture.’ After all, we make culture all the time, because our nature is tribal. Every time I went on a job site, culture-making was in progress. I’m sure you make culture at your jobs too.

Any group of people that works together long enough – especially if they’re working with their hands – naturally begins to make culture. It’s what we do. It’s spontaneous creativity, and as such extremely threatening to podrunks. It happens faster than they can control, so they fight the stability required to do it with every tool in their Machiavellian toolbox.

You know the tricks: they threaten our jobs, try to keep us scared, they tatter the safety-net, and resist its repair.

It’s all so, so old.

And then there’s always the racism ruse, when they play our strings with subterfuge – conning us back into those frozen ‘culture-boxes,’ to do the ‘division work’ that is the antithesis of ‘culture work.’

Although we ‘make culture’ almost as a matter of course, this is not the same as “developing a living culture.” The first means discrete, compartmentalized activities, in reaction to circumstances beyond our control.

The second is making of one’s life an integrated whole, in interdependency with others, under circumstances of our own creation.

The first is making the best of a bad situation. The second is self-creation.

This system pretends its essential nature is ‘complexity.’ It markets itself as confusingly, but necessarily, complex – so complex it must be handed over to “experts” to operate ‘efficiently.’ But the essence of this system that we’ve accommodated ourselves to is not “complexity,” but abusiveness. This system, in its essence, in its entirety, is abusive.

And when such a ‘system’ has no use for you – wishes, in fact, that you didn’t exist – what’s the ‘right’ response?

The Crips was a vehicle to provide us with illusionary empowerment, payback, camaraderie, protection, thuggery, and a host of other benefits. We wanted to be exempt from being disenfranchised, dyseducated, disempowered, and destitute, but opportunities for us were scarce. We were seventeen-year-olds with minds polluted by misconceptions, and we wanted to be emancipated from the struggle against the conditions seeking our extinction or emasculation. But regardless of the hostile opposition or lack of social privilege, my vested interest, like everyone else’s, was simply to survive. The Crips became central to my self-destructive resolve.
This forgotten generation created a quasi-culture with its own mores, style of dress, hand symbols, vernacular, socioeconomic qualities, martyrs, rituals, blue color identification (for Crips), legends, myths, and codes of silence. There were coined words for our madness. Buddha called it “Cripping” or “Crippen.” The newly found pride in the alliance gave birth to Crip mottoes such as “Crippen night and day is the only way,” Craig’s phrase. Melvin’s favorite was “Can’t stop, won’t stop.” Buddha’s brainchild was “Crips don’t die, we multiply.” Raymond’s favorite was “Chitty chitty bang bang, ain’t nothin’ but a Crip thang.”
“Do or die” was a common expression among us, on both east side and west side. Crippen was our raison d'être, our reason for being. It grounded us in a way that nothing else had. It permitted us to lash out at gangs and at a world that despised our existence. This was an apocalyptic moment for countless black youths. Merely to survive each day was a personal victory. Our alliance was beginning to be noticed, and we were widely reviled.
Deprived by our color and class of access to the American dream, we began a Crip-walk toward self-destruction. (Stanley Tookie Williams, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, p. 100)

The essential abusiveness of this system is what’s never mentioned in the ideological war on low-income, particularly black, communities. Racism is an easy scam to pull in an atomized society, where none of us knows how the other lives. But when you see a life within its circumstances, when you imagine yourself in those circumstances, when you realize that in those circumstances you would most likely do the very things you condemn when you’re outside that life – when you accept that the choices made in response to an abusive system make sense, then your eyes naturally turn to the source of the abuse, the insanity: the system itself (and what a writhing mess of knots it is).

‘Atomization’ – separation, division – therefore, is the crucial underpinning of insanity.

Under the present way of things, we’re separated from each other and we’re separated from ourselves.

There’s the obvious ‘isms’ that separate us: race, sex, income, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual preference, culture, nationality, education, immigration status. I’m sure we could iterate this endlessly. The present system has an obsession with taxonomy and we’re fed the basics with mother’s milk.

Once we’re classified and taught the basics of classification – our division work – we’re all sent out and told to compete. Inevitably in this toxemic brew, we tend to compete across all our categories. We rank and stereotype, dash about to their tune, and strive feverishly to insure our butts are in a comfortable seat when the music stops.

To question the race would invalidate all our years of creative accommodation to an invalid system.

Our creativity, therefore, serves either to enmesh us more deeply within what is clearly insane, or serves to fashion a way out of insanity.
Both things are happening as we speak, daily, by the second – minutely, massively.

As individuals we’ve done the best we can to meet our children’s needs that once were met by our tribes (“Continuum”), but it’s an impossible task, a set-up. We aren’t meant to be isolated atoms. We are a fabric, a tapestry.

Because we have no tribes, no living cultures, our resistance up to now – even when we join with other like-minded folks – has mostly taken individual, idiosyncratic forms.

Our reference is our individual bodies when we protest dirty air, food that’s actually garbage, water laced with pharmaceuticals, a state telling us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies.

Even when our resistance references larger groupings, as when our votes aren’t counted, or when we aren’t served at lunch counters, or when we’re harassed as women or gays, we’re not questioning the pie, just our slice.

Resistance without culture is easily contained, as is ‘culture’ under conditions of non-Freedom, i.e. when culture is not ‘self-creation’ but accommodation.
Culture as ‘self-creation’ is the only advocacy that references wholes, that represents for human beings as wholes and as a whole. It is the only advocacy that spirals up and away from the closed system of podrunk ‘Power.’

Our challenge here in America is to forge something new. The question is whether we’re up to the challenge. Because a people cannot survive over the long term – over the millennia – without a living culture, i.e. a culture in sync with the earth, based on freedom and wholeness for its people. How we meet this challenge will be of interest to other parts of the world facing a similar challenge.

And though cultural diversity may seem an insuperable difficulty now – when we’re barred from making living cultures – when you consider that by definition living cultures align with an inherent human nature that is joyous and free, reveres life, and respects freedom – align, therefore, with values rooted in the earth itself – I think we’ll find that unity is easier than we ever dared hope.

There was one admirable trait in the general character of the Typees which, more than any thing else, secured my admiration: it was the unanimity of feeling they displayed on every occasion. With them there hardly appeared to be any difference of opinion upon any subject whatever. They all thought and acted alike. I do not conceive that they could support a debating society for a single night: there would be nothing to dispute about; and were they to call a convention to take into consideration the state of the tribe, its session would be a remarkably short one. They showed this spirit of unanimity in every action of life: every thing was done in concert and good fellowship. (Herman Melville, Typee, chap. 27)

“Good fellowship” – I’m struck by that term because I believe our future is nestled between those two words.

Of course it is. That’s the point of life, right? It certainly isn’t about ladders and masks and “pulling fast ones,” or “making out like bandits” – which is all the present system holds out to us as bait.

The above quote is really quite telling. It should be carefully pondered and given its due weight. What it tells us about the quality of life these islanders enjoyed should give us pause. Human beings had this once – which means it is but ours to claim again, when we’re ready to believe in it.

It’s not just debating societies that fall by the wayside in such a world, but police, and bosses, and psychiatrists, and…

Such a world is the polar opposite of what we have now.

Non-freedom can never produce its opposite, and non-freedom is the essence of class society.

Within living cultures freedom resides, within living cultures our future is fertilized.

Joy is our guide in these matters. What serves the cause of joy we keep.
What doesn’t is for the bone-pile.

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 1

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter IV: Culture (Part 4)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work