WWADWWAD Newsletter - June 13th, 2022 Edition
Could the realization of a need for collective healing be an antidote?
June 13th, 2022 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 12
In my humble opinion a lot of people are doing the things they are doing because they are not yet healed from the things that have hurt them, myself included. Healing is a process, an ongoing often relapse-strewn one, but I’d argue that to opt out of it in entirety is to resign oneself to the perpetuation of harm and in so doing, continue the cycle of it.
This is not to say I think it is at all possible to force anyone to heal (nor would I, as a person with anti-authoritarian politics, ever want to force anyone to heal) and this is not to say I think this to be a moral failure when healing doesn’t happen. This is not a story of a set of individual moral failures, it’s a modern society-wide failure, as the majority of humanity right now does not have access to enough of the basic supports for life such that they can heal in a place of safety. There’s almost always a risk, an end date, or a limitation. Nowadays we heal in ongoing and ratcheting higher levels of pain.
I firmly believe we as humans could benefit in spades from prioritizing the minimization of human suffering through normalization of the transition from cycles of harm to cycles of healing. This is not because I think humans all need a cushy, state-mandated, artificial, individualistic, suffering-free lifestyle but because our individual stability is intrinsically correlated to our collective stability. We should focus on the maintenance of our individual mental health but we should also factor in each other when we do, because a shared commitment to this is essential to our individual healing processes.
Only ever through each of us healing out of a sense of responsibility for us all will we heal us all. When I mean heal I do not mean a return to the dystopian comatose baseline in any one of the many ways modern late stage capitalism deludes us into thinking about it. When I say heal I define this as the somatic and talk therapeutic process through which one is made to feel more autonomous within the personhood one inhabits such that one is less beholden to the whims of unresolved pain.
This can of course be practiced in the venue of our personal relationships but I think one of the first little things we can do as healing people is to collectively commit to the care-taking of each other’s nervous systems in organizing spaces. (For those of you who missed the issue where I first broached this topic you can read about this here). I am in the process of working to try to create some organizing spaces which foster this intentional careful handling of participants’ nervous systems, but it is tricky to navigate, as I recognize that unless I’m careful this attempt could devolve into more harsh correction of each other on our use of words (something I have personally experienced in many of these movement spaces which has felt exclusionary to me) or alternatively it could result in a sort of paralysis obstructing action altogether.
Beyond this I also have been witness to a considerable amount of anti-abuse rhetoric which doesn’t strike me as fully encompassing of the cyclical nature of harm, and which in fact touts itself as having a supposedly politically superior and less liberal understanding about domestic violence and informs a belief that “abusers” (an insufficiently defined term if you ask me) inherently necessitate violence in response to their actions. I personally oppose this idea, as I recognize based on research into the matter that abuse as far too complicated a reality to use in ad hominem description of even the most violent of people. And lest my opinion be criticized as not being survivor focused enough I would like to spell out that I believe in swift and effective attention to the safety needs of survivors. I even think as the No Exceptions Prison Collective says, that “when harm occurs in a community it may be necessary to separate those whose immediate physical actions have resulted in harm to another. Social separation is necessary at times. However, such separation should seek to create the space for transformative justice to assess the needs of survivors, those who have caused harm, and the community as a whole – ultimately resulting in the restoration of the individual to his or her community. A retributive system of criminal punishment is contrary to the common good and ensures the continued existence of community wide trauma and enslavement.” I see this abuse-reliant anti-abuse rhetoric as extremely counterproductive to its purported goals, extremely disconnected from the cyclical nature of trauma/harm, and extremely unconcerned with the only anti-authoritarian way the harm cycle truly stops, through healing.
Nobody should willfully rationalize the harm they do with the harm that’s been done to them, and we cannot continue with our habit of condoning this. Healing is possible and inevitable but we all have our hand on the dial of its full dimension, and many of us keep it forcibly muted for hegemonic capitalism survival, internet harshness avoidance, and from what I can tell a lot of egoic reasons. I also see a lot of hesitance towards accepting even such basic and research based ideas as the benefits to human connection that come with exhibiting vulnerability (likely due to the bottom line reality that vulnerability often entails a nod to, ever taboo, shame). I am grateful to see more popularized celebrations in recent times of sobriety milestones and people finding suitable therapists but I think there is much to be done still when it comes to totally de-stigmatizing and in fact normalizing the healing process.
The world being as it is, the Taurus in me felt this was the most important thought to share this month as this past month has been heavy in terms of instances of violence that have occurred which can unsettle our collective healing process.
(If you already agree things have been heavy lately you may want to skip this section. Section ends with “~~~”)
An Incomplete Timeline of Violence Since the last WWADWWAD Issue:
May 14th (the day after this last newsletter) a display of terrifying and deadly white supremacist horror was perpetrated in Buffalo, NY.
May 24th at 11:28AM (what I can only assume is Texas time, according to the Texas Tribune) a heinous crime against innocent children and their teachers was carried out in Uvalde, TX.
Night of June 2nd (AKST) in Anchorage, AK a man was alleged to have committed two counts of murder (also both intend serious injury & extreme indifference) on the downtown streets.
June 7th at 1:45PM (AKST) in Anchorage, AK we’re from Alaska’s CourtView public court docket led to believe that a man was arraigned on charges that he both sexually abused a minor (in as many as four counts), committed two counts of first degree murder, two counts of incest, four counts of murder two (intend serious injury & extreme indifference), two counts of tampering, and one count of forgery.
June 11th 31 members of a group calling themselves the “Patriot Front” were arrested near a pride event in Idaho, all were charged with “conspiracy to riot”.
All this following the leaked draft of an opinion favoring repeal of Roe v. Wade.
All this while immunocompromised people are left to fend for themselves against the COVID-19 virus.
All this under threat of deadly climate change.
And all this amid a looming threat of imperialist fight to the death nuclear warfare.
~~~
There have been gruesome shows of violence on global, national, and local levels and needless to say this has been a time that is significantly at odds with even some of our most courageous attempts at living towards healing and thus treating others well and caretaking their nervous systems as this focus instructs.
When I call for collective healing I do not mean to neglect to mention that we should of course take time to grieve. I have been learning it is good to intentionally raise this mention of grief because it’s one of the many displaced emotions of this time. Our grief in this time is deeply valid and deeply important to healing, and I hope that my words here about healing ring relevant especially after we all have respectively taken sufficient time to grieve and be with the immense pain that is caused by tragedies such as the recent violence listed in the timeline above.
These times are violent but our individual healing as supported by our collective healing and growth can be an antidote. We can be fierce in our efforts to put an end to violence with softness towards each other.
From my nervous system to yours,
Bailey D.
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Local Anchorage Mutual Aid Support Opportunity :
Opportunity:
The Anchorage Assembly is deciding very soon how to spend American Recovery Act (ARPA) funding and AKPIRG is partnering with the Mutual Aid Network of Anchorage (MANA) and Food For Thought Alaska (FFTA) to propose establishing an Economic Freedom Hub where our neighbors would be able to access in-person financial resources like debt counseling and mutual aid. This will allow MANA and FFTA to expand and help more families and community members give what they have and get what they need, whether it's bread to eat, access to a community health worker, or help with navigating debt.
How you can help:
Access this Google doc drawn up by FFTA to get the details about how you can help influence the Anchorage Assembly to support use of ARPA funds on this project. **Deadline to send in the letter of support you’ll read about in the Google doc is June 17th**
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Upcoming Events
(both National/Worldwide
and Local Anchorage)
National/Worldwide/Online:
Basic Principles of Somatic Experiencing - June 16th, 12-3PM EST, online event by Somatic Experiencing International, fee $55, registration includes access to a recording, register here by June 13th 8:59PM AKST
Public Health, People(s)-Centered Human Rights & Black Liberation - June 16th, 7PM EST, Webinar by the Black Alliance for Peace, register at bit.ly/ph-pchr-bl
Local, AKST Time:
Juneteenth Anchorage Citywide Celebration- June 18th-19th, 1-6PM, Delaney Parkstrip
Writer’s Block Pride Block Party - June 25th, 12-6PM @ Writer’s Block
Community Swap & Skate- June 25th, 5-8PM @ West High Skate Rink (/basketball court) (see below for details)
Drag Lotería- Pride Edition - June 26th, 6-8PM, at Cafecito Bonito, click here for tickets, all ticket sale proceeds will go to Food For Thought Alaska
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Assorted Transcriptions
(Of various talks I listened to in preparation for this issue):
“And I’ve been in groups where there’s so much hesitancy and fear of doing it wrong that we never get it out the door you know… I’ve been in groups that are rigid about time and everyone needs to be on time and report all these things in these ways and it can be really ableist and really push people away. I’ve been in these group where it’s like everyone is late to the meetings and you don’t know if anything got done from the tasks just like all these norms and habits that just make so much sense to me both in, you know, roles related to our big identities like racial identities or class histories or experiences with immigration but also like related to our family roles we’ve been in or like, “ How does the fact that I grew up in an alcoholic family show up in how I act in orgs?” Or different experiences people have had of surviving? Going numb or being always ready to just fight or being always ready to appease… We’ve got some deep embodied experiences that shape our groups and make group spaces, to me they make our group spaces a great potential trauma or potentially a great healing, like where you could finally feel accompanied, like where you can finally feel like people heard you and saw you. I’ve seen and experienced great healing.”
-Dean Spade, American Lawyer, Writer, & Trans Activist
“You cannot have global victories unless there’s a robust Left inside the U.S. that’s smashing this military enterprise, I don’t just mean the U.S. military, but arms sales. People in Yemen being killed daily because of U.S. and British arms sales to the Saudi regime. You got to have a strong left in the U.S. to destabilize the militarism. You cannot build socialism in Venezuela, and some of you will say ‘oh Venezuela, so many mistakes.’ You know for all the complaints you have about the Venezuelans what have you done, here, to destabilize the financial power of the U.S. to shut the caps on credit to any country that they don’t want to see lubricated with finance. It’s not a question of you spending your time judging countries around the world, the responsibility, and I take this from the understanding in Beijing, the responsibility is to build a movement here. That was a major casualty of 1991. You cannot have Internationalism … based on liberal sympathy. ‘I feel bad for the people of Yemen.’ You have to have a concrete understanding of the situation. And that concrete understanding today would lead you to put at the center the question of the arms industry and how the U.S. as a country benefits from selling basically mechanisms of death to people around the planet.
…You know it’s really interesting and this is there in the communist history project that we have. It’s really interesting how in the 1990s theories of spontaneity arrived as the new explanation for everything. In other words the concept ‘spontaneity’, which in Marxist theory has a very particular resonance, was taken out of its context and began to mean ‘ let the people do things’ & ‘people are doing things’, you know, it became this banal idea... The scholar’s role now is merely to point fingers. ‘They’re doing things there! They’re doing things there’ Why? How? How are they doing things? People don’t just do things. They have to organize things.
When Rosa Luxemburg wrote I think quite seriously about the concept spontaneity within the Marxist framework. She was interested in the dialectical interplay between spontaneity, organization, and vanguardism. In other words, she was trying to write in a context where a political party of the people must not believe that it is the main driver, main force of history but must understand that it works alongside the currents of working people where there might be spontaneous outbreaks of rebellion which the party must be engaged with. That was her point. Her point was not that people just rise up you don’t need organization. It was not so banal. But by the way new social movement theory. Now I know I’m caricaturizing this entire school of thought, but I would like to say to this school of thought, including Chantal Mouffe and Laclau, terrible book, published in the 1980s, 1985. Terrible book, so called post-Marxist book, that book pillaries the entire tradition of Marxism. So why should I give them back the courtesy of nuance? When they did not give my tradition any courtesy? That book made a mockery of Rosa Luxemburg. If you know your Rosa Luxemburg from the Mouffe and Laclau book, you’ll never understand the real Rosa Luxemburg. Because they don’t really, they don’t care about Luxemburg, they’re using Marxism to push anti-Marxism and open the door therefore for left wing people to become liberals. Because what happens with new social movement theory is you don’t need organizations anymore. You just have people rising up. Zapatistas rise up. It’s not true. It doesn’t work like that friends. They spend years building with each other. They build confidence with each other, they build communities out of their own community bonds. They utilize the bonds of history and radicalize them. Bonds of family, bonds of community, bonds of fellowship they are radicalized. Those bonds exist already or they are built.
But what this theory, social movement, what it does is it means that you can go back and you can write a history book without having the organizers. I find this amazing. These books are still written, till this day. There’ll be a book about a strike (trade union strike) but the activities of the union vanish and even more strikingly the communists disappear. There are no communists in these histories, all they’ve become is… Black radicals, suddenly their politics, I think that’s actually the highest form of racism, because you haven’t taken the people seriously they have ideas, they are not merely Black radicals, which is a reduction of a person to what you think is their identity. You don’t understand that the Black radical tradition is a rich engagement with Marxism with anarchism with all kinds of currents of the Left. It’s not merely about identity, it’s ridiculously infantilizing of the people that built organizations. You can’t just look back at history and say that that book doesn’t matter…
In our work we don’t effectively celebrate the tedium of radicalism. See here’s what I’m interested in mentioning. Part of new social movement theory was the idea that in rebellions you get a good idea of social structure. But if you merely look at the rebellion you miss the part before the rebellion. Because actually everything interesting is before then. It’s how people build rebellions. You see if you’re teaching young people after 1991. 1968 Paris, it disarms young people. Because then they think how will I do anything. I live in the most boring time. I don’t know how to make anything. They think oh my god there’s no spontaneous uprising in my area. So suddenly you made them without the tools to build anything. So when the moment arises 2007, 2008, 2009 and young people decide to go an occupy Zuccotti Square there’s no theory to help them. They’ve come there correctly, they are responding correctly to the moment but there’s no theory. And you say what theory are you being overly intellectual. I’m talking about Andy Deluvavich (?), he said, ‘if you have no theory I’m not coming with you.’ How are you going to make this occupation into transformation? What is your understanding of how you got there and where you’re going?
This is the site of intellectual life where we suffered I would say our most catastrophic defeat. It’s not in necessarily forgetting what happened in the Soviet Union but it’s in this because you’ve disarmed generations of people from serious political discussion about how you build to transform. It’s not enough to use Neoliberalism as an explanation for everything. Neoliberalism is like bogeyman or a monster. The question is not about what’s bad it’s about are we teaching young people how to transform, how to take the energy that they feel and transform.
Finally it’s important to recognize that in the rest of the world the Left did not surrender. And partly because it had already started developing its own understanding of its revolutions. Take the case of India, which I know well, the communist party splits in 1964, the largest section of the split, splits because they believe that the Soviet Union is too directive in telling the party how to understand its own reality. The other split was on an analysis of what was the nature of the Indian bourgeoisie. These debates are rich in the rest of the world they’ve been happening in these movements. They already decided the Soviet Union is not the center of their existence but it is an important part of the world revolution. So when the Soviet Union collapses these organizations don’t collapse they continue.
But in the literature about them, even written in India, they are an embarrassment, the Left is an embarrassment to scholars of the left. They would like a left which is perfect. They would like a Left that never makes an error. They would like a Left that is absolutely understanding of all the intersections that they are interested in. And if the Left hasn’t already sorted all this out it is worthless. What I have learned from this attitude is that the intellectual is perfect, because the intellectual has transformed all these contradictions. I would recommend you go back and read Marx, early Marx where he writes ‘the state assumes that it has liberated itself from the contradictions of society and it banishes the contradictions to society and it stands apart and condemns society.’ Some times I think Left intellectuals have this attitude toward society, you sit apart and condemn society, you see yourself as advanced… I am … Anti-Capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Racist, anti-homophobic, anti- misogynistic , decolonial… anti-Trump…
But these movements are messy because they live in the world. You know the American poet Muriel Rukeyser really put it well when she said “communists are exiles from the future”. I mean it’s difficult, guys to change the world, it’s really difficult. Because the weight of history is burdensome. I mean, don’t think that it’s easy to move the world and because one has the correct ideas therefore one is liberated from the work of moving the world. The job of the intellectual isn’t to have the correct ideas the job of the intellectual is to interpret the world in order to transform it. So one looks then at these parties that exist in the rest of the world and there is an edge of embarrassment, because they keep doing wrong things, but they are not homogenous, inside them people are arguing, fighting, having debates, just as in 1964 in the Indian party there was a major debate.
In China, now you see in the West we want to have this discussion, ‘Is China communist or has it restored capitalism?’ You know, this is a classic discussion one hears in Left forums. Who are you to condemn it? Like, that is that the best framing you can come up with? Why don’t you ask a different question, ‘what do Chinese intellectuals think about what’s happening in China?’ or ask an even deeper question, ‘what is the debate inside China around the question of socialism?’ I would like to hear that discussion, not your understanding of whether it’s restored so you like the pope will now decide to whether to excommunicate 1.4 billion people from the camp of socialism. It’s not up to you, I want to hear what they’re debating. Because it’s their reality. It’s their reality more than your reality, for you it’s an article in a magazine, for them it’s day to day. You have to have an attitude of understanding. Not an attitude of benediction.”
-Vijay Prashad, What is the Meaning of the Left?
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Assorted Video & Article Recommendations:
Contrapoints’ new video (of course artistically a dream)
Bernard Center For Research on Women’s Youtube videos, segments from which are both excerpted above, entitled We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid For Survival and Solidarity and What is the Meaning of the Left?
Inspiring article about ongoing efforts to stop police expansion into the South River Forest in Atlanta
Recent Noam Chomsky interview I found informative