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CHAPTER 1
Some Thoughts on Revolutionary Love and Survival in the 21st Century
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you
— Octavia Butler
I've been accused of being impatient. It's true. I'm impatient. I don't have time to fuck around. None of us do. There is hard work to be done now. And those of us on the margins — we mamas, caretakers, femmes, black aunties, lovers, and fighters — the work is on us. It's not fair that this work is on us, but it is. No one else is going to do it.
Have you seen white people for the past five hundred years, their colonization and enslavements, their genocides and exploitation of the natural world? The delusions they tell themselves that they are somehow so separate from the natural world, that they can destroy the world, each other, and us and — still survive? They are a mess.
They have, decade after decade, century after century, become so morally and rationally weak that they have convinced themselves that two minus two equals infinity, not zero. That greed is good. That the earth is flat. That the heart doesn't break at death. That love is slave work, roses, and complacency. That heaven is what we gain once they make hell on earth.
These are not people we can rely on to save us from themselves. They are still burning the earth away.
In 2005, when I was in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I met with communities of mamas who were doing the hard, life-giving work of recreating civil society in the midst of wars. The Congolese farmer women told me that they can't predict the weather anymore. Clouds don't mean what they used to. And their children are taken to the mines to dig coltan so that we can have smartphones.
The consequences of the globalized world economy would certainly have been far more nefarious except for the efforts that millions of women have made to ensure that their families would be supported, regardless of their value on the capitalist labor market. Through their subsistence activities, as well as various forms of direct action (from squatting on public land to urban farming) women have helped their communities to avoid total dispossession, to extend budgets and add food to the kitchen pots. Amid wars, economic crises, and devaluations, as the world around them was falling apart, they have planted corn on abandoned town plots, cooked food to sell on the side of the streets, created communal kitchens — Lola communes, as in Chile and Peru — thus standing in the way of a total commodification of life and beginning a process of reappropriation and re-collectivization of reproduction that is indispensable if we are to regain control over our lives.
— Silvia Federici
We all are implicated in late-stage capitalism. And yes, some folks are much more implicated and responsible than others. If we survive into the 22nd century, there will need to be some reckoning. Someday we will need a truth-and-reconciliation commission where the descendants of thieves don't get to keep the wealth.
But first we need to survive. And that's on all of us.
I used to believe that revolution could save us. That revolution, deep social transformation that centers the work and needs of the least among us, could stop the death machines. That we, humans and nonhumans, conquerors and conquered, would come together and find a way to live, in justice, peace and harmony, to restore the earth and waters and soil. That we would be able to stop this madness. But lately when I read environmental reports, I hear the alarms of scientists ringing. And I realize they have grown more desperate. Scientists used to tell us what was going to happen if we didn't stop this madness. Now they just tell us what level of annihilation is coming into being: earthquakes in South Carolina, desertification in Yemen, and ancient diseases finding new life. And yes, the earth has always changed, but this is happening all too fast.
I'm not saying that resistance isn't still possible, I'm just wondering if resistance is enough. At best, a revolution might make it possible that more of us who love and care for the water and life will survive this century. But I still believe in revolution.
In large part, my writing is inspired by the mamas I met and talked with over the years. Conversations about childcare and burnout, fathers and grandmothers, schools, poems, tea, music, activism, and good cheap takeout food. The laughter and the overwhelming expectations, the fear and the rituals of living. How we make life out of no life. How we make life out of our own lives. How we make life.
Globalization aims to give corporate capital total control over labor and natural resources. Thus it must expropriate workers from any means of subsistence that may enable them to resist a more intense exploitation. As such it cannot succeed except through a systematic attack on the material conditions of social reproduction and on the main subjects of this work, which in most countries are women.
Women are also victimized because they are guilty of the two main crimes which globalization is supposed to combat. They are the ones who, with their struggles, havecontributed most to "valorizing" the labor of their children and communities, challenging the sexual hierarchies on which capitalism has thrived and forcing the nation state to expand investment in the reproduction of the workforce. They have also been the main supporters of a noncapitalist use of natural resources (lands, waters, forests) and subsistence-oriented agriculture, and therefore have stood in the way of both the full commercialization of "nature" and the destruction of the last remaining commons.
— Silvia Federici
Science Fiction
There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves.
— Octavia Butler
I've stopped taking it all so personally. The racism and capitalism and ecocide, the sexism and homophobia, how tired everyone in the United States seems even though they claim they are living the best life in the best country in the world. When folks are being worked to the bone and drinking poisoned water in their coffee every morning, there isn't a lot of psychological energy left to figure out that this "best life" is all a hoax and a wink. I imagine that anti-Blackness and capitalism and ableism are huge mindless machines with tentacles hooked into people's spines, making them unable to stand for what is right. Every day I pray, not for the revolution, not for a savior, just to have the strength to constantly disentangle myself from the machine.
Science fiction creators taught me not to take the machine personally: the wear and tear, day in and day out, of microaggressions and weird looks and empty bank accounts, and off-conversations and news reports and movies and some drunk guy trying to holla at me and another cop found not guilty for shooting a Black boy who wasn't even old enough to vote, and our water tasting like rusty metal. While we do need to constantly unplug from the violence of the invisible machines, we aren't going to survive simply by boycotting products made in Israeli settlements or having multiracial babies. We aren't going to survive by "voting with our dollars," and we aren't going to make a revolution through the purity of our lifestyles.
We Are Not the Ones Destroying the Earth
Marginalized mothers — poor mothers, queer mothers, single mothers, Black and Brown mothers, Native mothers, teen mothers, etc. — we mamas are the ones who are often blamed by mainstream discourse for the economic destruction and ecological degradation that is happening to this planet and human communities. We are blamed for the very collapse of societies globally. We are not the ones destroying the earth.
For many of us, the end of the world happened a long time ago. For many Native folks in the Americas, the end of the world began five hundred years ago. For the colonized folks on the African continent, the end of the world, the nearly wholesale ecological and economic destruction, has taken place, is taking place. No need for the future tense when the apocalypse has already happened to us.
And yet, the end of rapacious and murderous Western civilization, the global North, is blamed on mothers. Poor mothers are depicted as welfare queens living off the teat of the government and "hardworking" taxpayers. Queer mothers and single mothers are destroying the very foundation of the nuclear family. Black mothers can only reproduce criminality. Immigrant mothers are just producing anchor babies andare destroying the very concept of what "nationhood" and "nation-state" mean.
First, good on these mothers for doing the work of destroying oppressive structures such as nation-statehood, the nuclear heteronormative family, and for redistributing money and resources from the wealthy and the government coffers back to the poor, Indigenous, and colonized, so that these folks have the opportunity to create more liberated and egalitarian community structures.
Second, and more importantly, marginalized mamas are not destroying the fabrics that support us as whole human beings. We are not the ones destroying the earth. We are not the ones creating civil wars that kill millions of people and create droughts and famines in east Africa. We are not the reason that there are refugee crises happening in Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan. We did not cause the global recession in 2008. No, that was caused by banks too big to fail and decades of economic policies that allowed for speculative finance to run wild. We are not the reason that there still isn't clean water in Flint, Michigan. We aren't the reason that a massive chunk of iceberg, nearly the size of Delaware, broke off Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf recently. We did not cause global warming and climate instability. We are not the ones destroying the earth, we are liberatory, resistance communities that are humanity's best chance for humans and nonhumans to survive into the next century.
What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and market. This is not a utopia, but a process already under way in many parts of the world and likely to expand in the face of a collapse of the world financial system. Governments are now attempting to use the crisis to impose stiff austerity regimes on us for years to come. But through land takeovers, urban farming, community-supported agriculture, through squats, the creation of various forms of barter, mutual aid, alternative forms of healthcare — to name some of the terrains on which the reorganization of reproduction is more developed — a new economy is beginning to emerge that may turn reproductive work from a stifling, discriminating activity into the most liberating and creative ground of experimentation in human relations.
— Silvia Federici
Mothering isn't gendered. Everyone, including and especially men, must engage in this mothering work. Like Alice Walker says, "Mothering is an instinct, yes, but it is also a practice. It can be learned." I go further and say it should be learned. Mothering is the only way we are going to survive into the 22nd century. And we have to center those who are most skilled in that work, many of whom are mothers of children. Some of us have been socialized, trained, in this work. This is our best chance for saving the human species and all living beings from annihilation.
In every community I've worked with, it was mamas who actually held it down. They continue to be the locus of strategy for resisting the genocidal powers that be. Mamas are going to survive because mamas create families, communities, relationships, and new ecologies that are rooted in humanity's survival. New ways of loving each other. A new world of liberation and justice, of local control over land and resources, of anti-violence, of new economies being created outside of capitalistic control.
These new/old ways of being exist everywhere in the third world. People sitting on worn blankets and selling goods, foods, and services on the side of the road. Community, mutual aid, local gardens, folks squatting empty buildings, and recreating homes and sites of production and reproduction. They are hair-braiders and marijuana dealers, herbalists and traditional healers, sex workers and cooks selling empanadas out of their makeshift kitchen windows. These new communities of sharing, bartering, and trading, of creating local currencies, are being reproduced daily by women. By mothers. By mother of mothers. We are the ones learning new ways to love and thrive.
We create resistance communities and safe spaces not just for the little nuclear families, but for all the lovers and fighters, so that we can rest, gather resources, and make connections between people and organizations engaged in this revolutionary work. Spaces set up all over the cities, mountains, jungles, and countrysides. This is the mothering work that makes the revolution possible.
But most activists brag about being out in the streets, not at home, making food and laughing, keeping first-aid kits stocked in the bathroom, and extra sheets and blankets for unexpected guests.
Mothering is revolutionary. Revolution is mothering. Revolution is impossible without mothering. And as Cynthia Oka said, there is no revolution without mothering.
For we have seen that, as soon as the anticolonial, the civil rights, and the feminist movements forced the system to make concessions, it reacted with the equivalent of a nuclear war. ... If the destruction of our means of subsistence is indispensable for the survival of capitalist relations, this must be our terrain of struggle.
— Silvia Federici
When You Can't Opt Out of Revolution
The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.
— Grace Lee Boggs
In the global North, we have created radical activist communities that not only don't center radical mothering and caretaking but also push mothering, mamas, and children to the margins.
On the left, I hear conversations around mothers and children, and it is often in the context of how children and their mothers, disabled folks and their caretakers, would "get in the way" of the "real" activism work. Folks say the obligation of caretakers is to ensure the ultimate "safety" for children in movement work. They need to stay home, stay back. That those who are most physically and politically vulnerable should not be at the center or the front lines of our movements.
How did we forget that it is mamas and their children who are the impetus for our radical movements? It was Native youth who began the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock. Mamas in the eastern DRC are creating civil societies in the face of militant, political, and sexual violence. Youth in the West Bank are on the front lines of the uprisings. Mamas created the strategies and tactics that opposed the annihilation and genocide of Palestinians.
Back in the day, I worked in Palestinian communities, in which children were the targets of the Israeli military. I walked with Palestinian children to school past violent Israeli settlements and army checkpoints. These children couldn't and didn't opt out of the Intifada, the years and decades of uprising. They couldn't opt out of the revolution even though they were incredibly vulnerable. Their lives were on the line just to be educated. Just to go to school.
Egyptian youth went to the Cairo streets and demanded the fall of the regime. At Tahrir Square, mamas provided food, blankets, and childcare. They carried their young children on their shoulders to Tahrir Square while waving Egyptian flags and demanding "bread, freedom, and dignity." In the early days of the uprising, mothers and their kids celebrated, built community, and provided care for each other.
This was not what folks saw on the evening international news.
Without mothers and children, not just at the margins or the center of the revolution, but as the very context of revolution, who is left? Is it just a bunch of boys in black hoodies yelling on the front lines?
Dreams of a Moral Liberation
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.
— James Baldwin
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
— Toni Morrison
When I was in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in a small border town called Uvira, I talked with a woman community leader. When I asked her what her vision was, her hope for her community, she replied, "I want a moral liberation for my communities."
"What does 'moral liberation' mean?" I asked.
She said it was a society that would reward her sons for working toward the good of the community, because right now they were rewarded for destroying the community.
Before this conversation, I had spent two weeks listening to personal testimonies and community stories about the wars in the eastern DRC. Militias paid a pittance to boys and young men to massacre and rape their neighbors. Ever since I left the Congo, I've held onto this framework of morally liberatory communities: to be so free that we can act for the good of our community, of our humanity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "This Is How We Survive"
by .
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