Put Your Hands in the Mud II
What does it look like to protest, to change, to revolutionise an economy you are necessarily complicit in to get that bread-o? How do we force reparations from national governments that are caught between an inability to regulate capital and a will to serve the ‘national interest’ by optimising the ratio of capital to population size within its borders? How do we tackle corporations whose products we want, but who have no accountability to us?
Extinction Rebellion came up against the same problems protesting climate change (spoiler alert: racial violence, extractive capitalism and climate destruction are linked – even though Extinction Rebellion UK don’t seem to be aware). Their solution was: it doesn’t matter if you’re complicit, if you take flights, if you sometimes use a disposable coffee cup – the need to protest, to rebel, is more urgent. In other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
It seems that many of us are asking for abolition: of the police, of resource extractive industries, of, as bell hooks put it, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. So how do we do that?
We’re all familiar with Karl Marx’s call to seize the means of production. When I first read about it, I envisaged a big machine, which workers held captive or turned off until their bosses agreed better pay; something between the miners’ strikes (preventing production and breaking profits) and cooperatives (working within the company to mitigate its exploitation of you). We know about boycotts, where consumers try to influence production practices by decreasing demand. In drastic actions, we see America blocking Huawei, Gandhi leading Indians to stop buying British products, like cotton, and more casually, consumers buying Fairtrade or going vegan. We know about embargoes, like the US blocking companies from trading with companies based in Cuba or Iran, and divestment, like universities and pension funds moving their investments away from fossil fuels and sweatshops. We know about nationalist take overs, with Egypt taking back the Suez Canal from the British, and Mugabe seizing land from white farmers.
What are the means of production today, and what tools do we have at our disposal?
If the means of production are dispersed then revolution can’t be a one-time, one place thing, where we rise up unanimously, attack and win decisively. It must be decentralised and ongoing; it must spread and propel action.
We’re living in a world with a gutted job market. Increasingly, you’re at the top or you’re at the bottom, and there’s nothing in the middle. You’re treated like a machine, no health, no rest, no security, just output. You are served by people treated like machines, no contact, quick delivery, quiet ride. It is a daily assault, and equally a revolutionary force beyond Marx’s wildest dreams (bye-bye bourgeoisie). We’re living through Western decline, rising China, rising Asia, limited resources, hotter temperatures, more people, less water. We protest at a time of seismic shifts under the socio-economic crust, watching political systems ill-equipped to handle them float on top. But earthquakes and eruptions don’t always bring good things – unless it’s crystallising the rich in lava and trapping them forever in a new Pompeii.
White people in the UK and the US were historically sheltered from the worst effects of capitalism by the grosser exploitation of Black and colonised people; those in sweatshops in Bangladesh or immigrants in Leicester on shit wages so working-class white people could buy cheaply to distract themselves from their own oppression. Increasingly, these White people are less sheltered, and the Western nation-state model which existed to increase wealth for the rich and keep the workers from rioting is ceasing to function. White anger often attacks Black and brown people, whose increase in political freedoms matched the timeline of White Western socio-economic decline (not that White anger was directed elsewhere previously). Within Gen Z, this White anger at disinheritance has also forged a level of ally-ship with Black anger. Some White people are waking up to their small oppression, extrapolating it, and understanding their societies better.
What formed this interracial ally-ship within Gen Z? It’s an interesting tool for us. Is it linked to the progress made with political and civil freedoms - shared education, more visible interracial relationships, global knowledge of Black American culture due to Black American proximity to imperial power? Is it activist beauty Vloggers and decolonisation TikTok accounts, second-generation immigrant influencers, rappers with book clubs?
The thing about the means of production is that there are many. There are many employers, many workplaces, many countries, many governments. How do you go on strike if you work at a startup? How do you defend yourself from corporate racism as the only Black employee? If the means of production are dispersed then revolution can’t be a one-time, one place thing, where we rise up unanimously, attack and win decisively. It must be decentralised and ongoing; it must spread and propel action.
Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, the Umbrella protests - protests of the internet - have no leaders. They are necessarily decentralised in response to the dispersed means of production and capital, a global population (for BLM and XR at least), and surveillance states. A leaderless revolution carries new responsibilities for participants. At once, no-one is a leader, and everyone is a leader. Without figureheads, clarity of message takes on the utmost importance. If we move from trusting the priest to trusting the bible, the text must be understood. The role of the activist becomes to catch, form, clarify, share and promote the revolutionary message.
Social media holds possibilities for us. Transmission is scattered, time and place is shared by participants, capital is concentrated in the hands of a few mega conglomerates. Is social media the medium for a revolutionary message?
Noname, in her Book Club, has drawn on and popularised a host of Black revolutionary thinkers to shape her discourse. She’s done this publicly, on Instagram and Twitter, bringing them in to shape a lineage for young thinkers. She’s doing what Gil Scott Heron asked of the next generation of rappers in his 1994, ‘Message to the Messengers’:
All I'm sayin' is that you damn well got to be correct
Because if you're gonna be speaking for a whole generation
And you know enough to handle their education
Be sure you know the real deal about past situations
And ain't just repeating what you heard on a local TV station
Sometimes they tell lies and put them in a truthful disguise
But the truth is, that's why we said it wouldn't be televised
Gil Scott Heron, famous for ‘the revolution will not be televised’, knew the power of the message, and of co-opting and using large channels of communication, like radio, to spread revolution. ‘The revolution will not be televised’ means that the revolution will never be broadcast by the state or by large corporations because it is in their interests to preserve the status quo. When the state engages, they act to contain and divide protestors, muddying the message. We see this continually: But what about white lives?; Hasn’t Kaepernick gone too far?; Shouldn’t protests be peaceful like Kaepernick? And in the UK; Isn’t this about the US?; Isn’t removing statues just erasing the past?; Not all protestors want to abolish the police, right?; We don’t have a problem with race – there are two Asians in cabinet.
On social media, we are all messengers. Elena Ferrante describes using the internet as walking around constantly shitting and pissing yourself, soiling yourself with an endless excretion of data. We are mined for the data we shit and piss everywhere we go, but we can form, carry and pass the message, buy or boycott, watch or ignore, trend or drop, signal boost or silence. With TV, we consume. With social media, we consume and create, generate, excrete. In fact, if data is the product, we ourselves are the means of production.
So what does this mean? Can you “seize” Facebook’s means of production? No, seriously, you made it this far. I’m asking you.
A practical difficulty is that these mega companies are virtual utilities. As Facebook and Amazon buy everything on the American and European internet, Whatsapp and Instagram, and Whole Foods, Goodreads, Abebooks, Audible, IMDb respectively, they are increasingly the only option for many of the things we want. To seize their operations, what would we need? An international boycott? Groups of revolutionary vanguards across the world sabotaging their servers, an Anonymous-style super hacker group delivering one fell swoop from matrixed locations? Would this even be helpful?
In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous says that when women engage in class struggle, we need to “split it open, spread it out, push it forward,” fill it with the fundamental struggle (against patriarchy, we add), and make sure that our individualities and differences are not crushed.
Of revolutionary resistance, she writes:
Let’s leave it to the worriers, to masculine energy and its obsession with how to dominate the way things work… For us the point is not to take possession in order to internalize or manipulate, but rather to dash through and “fly”. Flying is a woman’s gesture… for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away… What woman hasn’t flown/stolen?”
Hélène Cixous writes in French, where ‘to fly’, voler, is also ‘to steal’. Reading this, I wonder (Carrie Bradshaw style) if we don’t need to overcome the means of production or dominate them. Maybe we just need to steal from them, seize what we can get and run, jump, fly into our freedom. It’s like the revolution in Snowpiercer. Our purpose is not to take over the train. We must stop the train, destroy it. Take what we need and flee to freedom. ‘You wanna fly?’ Toni Morrison asks us, ‘you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.’
In her book Steal as Much as you Can, Natalie Olah argues that living under capitalism, you must deeply internalise that the system is meant to exploit you. Done that? So claim all your sick days, do revolutionary work on billable hours, refuse to socialise at work, leave at 5pm, embrace imposter syndrome, swap complicity for theft, change your career path, spend your time differently. Steal, take, outlast, resist, let go. Acknowledge yourself as a cog in the means of production. This is an acknowledgement of your own power: each one of us must seize it.
Black Lives Matter activists have been successful at stealing ourselves from the man. In June, we co-opted Instagram to carry, clarify and spread the message. This spread global protest through every US state and most UK cities, European capitals, much of Africa. In the UK, the message was strikingly different to TV/mainstream media coverage, and it was heard despite Black people being the minority in population and the minority in power throughout the cities of protest. It’s no coincidence that the protests happened when people were forced to take a break from the office environment, and the primary method of group social interaction became social media.
That’s why, white readers, when you aren’t sharing antiracist content on your feeds and stories, you are crossing a picket line. Your posts become part of the mountain of useless information we have to wade through just to spread the word, reach the next person. Your one Black friend with a Black Lives Matter story in a sea of yoga and pot-plants is Jon Snow drowning at the Battle of the Bastards. You must swap sides, seek out the message, catch it, activate it, and pass it on. Share with your White families and friends that the algorithms won’t give us access to. Don’t cross the picket.
In our echo-chambers and safe spaces, undiluted Black solidarity birthed, shaped, shared, grew and carried the message. We shared in an enormous pain and trauma openly, a horror felt globally, locally, in families and friendship groups. We resisted, saw each other resisting, and radiated outwards. I carried it into my workplace, my wallet, my community life, my old university, my politics, my friendships, my eating habits, my sleep schedule, my hobbies. Black Lives Matter is not a moment. Any time, any place, I don’t care who’s around. How else can I live?
We must work and we must stop waiting for revolution. It is here, it is now. No-one is coming to save us, to dominate our oppressors and deliver us.
So what do we draw on and where do we go now from here?
It’s guerrilla warfare, 2020. Of course it’s imperfect, we’re under constant surveillance. We are watched citizens. But the oppressed, the colonised, the female, the marginalised, the poor – we are always watched, monitored, observed, caged, restricted. That’s why revolutionary warfare is guerrilla, why we must steal and cannot dominate. Because where we are blocked from power, we must use subterfuge, resistance, resilience, foot-dragging and stealing to assault the oppressor, while funnelling our time, money and love into the freedom we envisage, relying on mutual aid, community solidarity and a knowledge that, eventually, we will overcome.
Does it feel big and overwhelming? Like massive, powerful, entrenched structures are preventing us from determining our own destinies and living as free humans? Well yeah, that’s called the economy. And yes – it’s really hard to change. It may take time. The revolutionary message must be spread and realised in all areas of life: work and inheritance, mental and physical health, genders and climate justice, bank balance and spending habits, social activity, sexual and romantic relationships, family life. Social media is nothing without this work, but it can carry the message.
Cixous says of patriarchy in the present day,
…all of that comes from a period in time governed by phallocentric values. The fact that this period extends into the present doesn’t prevent woman from starting the history of life somewhere else. Elsewhere, she gives. …She gives that there may be life, thought, transformation. This is an “economy” that can no longer be put in economic terms.
We cannot continually live in the past, in the known, or it will throttle us. It will cover us like a stench. It will linger around us like rot and decay is seeping from our insides, poisoning fertile earth. As much as we can, wherever possible, we must live. We must live as if we are free already. We must speak as if our demands are not only achievable, obvious, preliminary, but just around the corner.
We must work and we must stop waiting for revolution. It is here, it is now. No-one is coming to save us, to dominate our oppressors and deliver us. It’s time for us to plunge our hands into the dirt and seize ourselves, with joy and fear, out of complicity and into freedom. Tell me what that means to you! Tell me how you will live.
Our ancestors are yet to be unearthed; their dreams are yet to be realised.