after the election.
After the election, I stayed in bed for days. Curled around the soft glow of my phone screen, I did my best to radiate love & hope & support for all my comrades, for every body crushed and imperilled by the Labour defeat. Every last bit of my energy was directed outwards—and that was okay. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to be. In quiet moments, unguarded moments, a thought would flicker-flash like lightning: how am I to survive? In those moments I imagined, all in one confused instant, a nearing future where I could no longer afford the medication that keeps me alive; where my already-unaffordable rent rose even higher, plunging me back into homelessness; where the slackening of food contamination regulations sparked off my latent eating disorder for a third cycle. I remembered how it was when I was a child, growing up in a city condemned by Thatcher & co. to “managed decline”: how difficult and grey things were, how horrible the food we ate. How, at my primary school, whenever it rained, the whole class would rise, help to move the tables, and reposition ourselves around the necessary buckets that caught the countless ceiling-drips. How normal this seemed. How, even to this day, I draw a deep nostalgic comfort from sites of rubble & dereliction: the nest that nurtured me. I thought about a world that would get crueller, in which it would be literally more difficult to breathe. And these thoughts, taken together in an eyeblink rush, would overwhelm me, and my body would tense in fear, and I’d retreat even further into my phone, telling people over and again that there was love, hope, possibility, that we could resist, that all was not lost. An incantation, a magic spell; the hope and half-belief that by wording it I’d somehow make it real.
And then, my Christmas cactus bloomed for the first time, and I realised that I didn’t need to speak these things to make them real. That things can be joyful and hopeful and beautiful even in the most hopeless of conditions. (Not the first time I have learnt these lessons of renewal from my vegetal comrades.) This doesn’t negate the hopelessness; rather, the hopelessness makes the work of hope all the more important. There this plant had been, all these years, quietly drawing nourishment from the soil and from the air and from the light, only to flare into flower when I least expected it, when I needed it the most—when I had given up hope that it would ever blossom. This felt like an example I might follow: a quiet attentiveness, a diligence, a rootedness, a deep commitment to the promise of the flower, even after the disappointment of dormancy.
In this spirit, I wanted to wait before writing about the election. I wanted to replenish myself, to grieve the loss, to give my thoughts enough time to slow their panicked swirl and coalesce into something more spacious. The tawdry opportunism of the instant take left me cold; I wanted to learn how to navigate this new landscape of apparently-extinguished possibility. These things take time. But, finally, I’m ready. Here are some of the thought-lines I’ve been following over the past few weeks.
On Corbyn.
When Corbyn was first elected leader, I couldn’t even talk to most of my friends about my politics. Sure, they might have seen me on Facebook ranting about capitalism or posting quotes, but if those things registered at all, it would have been to eye rolls. A disenfranchised, ironised boredom was the prevailing affect. Today, every single one of those friends has been activated. They engage with radical issues from sex workers’ rights to trans liberation, climate justice, workplace organisation, disability activism, housing and food action, and so much more. And these transformations have transformed me, too: as my friends have shared their political experiences with me, my own horizons have expanded. I don’t think that this would have happened had Corbyn not won that leadership election. Without warning, a space opened up—the merest fissure in the impenetrable edifice of capitalist realism. And through that tiny space, in flooded light. And all of a sudden, we knew there was an outside.
It could only have been Corbyn. Moral and gentle, with a strong sense of justice but none of the fierce revolutionary energy of McDonnell, he seemed to embody many of the values to which the liberal establishment pretended. A middle-class non-conformist, a man of principle who lived an almost ascetic, frugal life by the standards of Westminster. Hell yeah, he seemed to say, I recycle. In a political landscape shaped by the Parliamentary expenses scandal, here was a man who, as Tom Gann observed (in an uncharacteristically Badiouan piece from 2015), “project[ed] utter incorruptibility”. He had a documented history of principled action, including opposition to the illegal invasion of Iraq that disillusioned so many people who had previously been politically engaged. It was all so refreshing after the zealous messianic hawkishness of Blair, the stodgy technocracy of Brown, the weathervane policy void of the Miliband years—and people flooded into to Labour party to vote for him, keen to elect a leader who shared their values and understood their needs.
The point is, we knew what Corbyn was. We knew what he was, and what he was is precisely how any of this was ever possible. A 🌩spooky scary Marxist🌩 candidate would never have been elected in 2015; how many times did McDonnell fail to even get on the ballot? Corbyn, the principled peacebuilder, the mild-mannered allotmenteer whose public speaking skills were lacking to say the least—Corbyn was non-threatening enough to make it, against all expectations (including his own), through the selection process and onto the front benches. In all his limits, in all his goodness, he was the only leader the left could have had. Loyal and conflict-averse to a very serious fault, yes. But he believed that every person had a poem, a painting, a song, a story within them. He had faith in people; he thought the best of them. Sometimes people took advantage of that; sometimes those people were powerful, and their unscrupulousness cost the party much. But more often, his ability to see the best in people brought out the best in them. It was a powerful and a beautiful thing to witness.
This is why attempts by many left-wing figures to distance themselves from Corbyn are utterly reprehensible. He failed the membership, they insist, by not shouting enough, not disciplining the PLP, not forcing though democratic selections; by not campaigning more forcefully for Remain, or for Leave, or for a second referendum, or for Brexit; by failing to assemble via. dogwhistle the fictitious “white working class”; by not entering into a so-called “progressive alliance” with the austerity-championing Lib Dems... the list of complaints goes on, an endless scroll of bellyaching Cassandras, each not wishing to be associated with a ‘loser’, not wanting their personal brands to be contaminated by association with failure.
But Corbyn was Corbyn. He was the only leader we could have had, and he was the leader we got, and he did what he could do—and that wasn’t nothing. Conversations changed. Space was opened up. Light came flooding in. People were given room to hope again, to imagine a better world than this. To have that hope so decisively dashed is crushing, and it will take time for all of us to grieve and to recover. People will very likely die at the hands of this Tory government, and, as Horkheimer cautioned Benjamin, “the dead are really dead.” We must mourn them, and honour them, and never forget them. But we must also fight for the living. And that work cannot begin until we stop trying to use the torch that Corbyn passes to us as a means of scorching the earth behind us.
On the result.
The political theorist (and, as of 23 November 2019, my husband!!) Tom Gann, writing in 2016, said:
To defend Corbyn is also, though, to will and then engage in the thought and practical effort required to resolve the serious problems articulating, defending and finding ways to institutionalise and implement a modern socialist programme.
In the post-election ritual flagellation of Corbyn (and, to a slightly lesser extent, McDonnell), we see the same failure to stand by our principles that Tom articulated three years ago. One defeat, and supposed ‘radicals’ become cynically electoralist, as though winning on an ethically-compromised platform would have been any sort of victory for the left. It is true that the humanitarian crisis of austerity is likely to grow more acute during this Parliament. I live below the poverty line (and almost always have done); I’m close enough to the danger to be acutely aware of it. Nevertheless, I am proud to have campaigned for a party with this manifesto, and I only wish that the conjuncture of circumstances had been such that the manifesto had been enough. They weren’t, and that’s heartbreaking—but it’s also okay, because it has to be. We gain nothing from pontificating about how we might modify or dilute our socialism in order that ‘our side’ might win. What’s needed (or, rather, what I think is needed) is to look unflinchingly at the circumstances of this loss. This is the thing I’ve found most difficult, because it involves asking myself a very bleak question:
People chose cruelty. Why?
I don’t have the answers—and, in all honesty, anybody who’s claiming to have all the answers almost certainly has some sort of agenda or product that they’re trying, subliminally, to sell you. What I do think, though, is that this election was probably unwinnable. Labour’s Brexit policy was, as far as I can see, the only means of mediating the commitments of a membership that encompasses ‘leavers’, ‘remainers’, and (& my sense is that this is the largest bloc) people who just don’t really care about the EU. It also seemed to me the most democratic of the policies on offer. Though we don’t yet have the volume of data that would allow for a proper analysis—and the data we do have appears not to clarify but to complicate—it seems as though key portions of the electorate in certain crucial seats may have cared more about “Getting Brexit Done” (🤢) than about anything else, democracy included. Indeed, anecdotes from friends who campaigned in strong ‘leave’ constituencies suggest that some voters felt that Labour’s policy was anti-democratic. “We’ve already had our say,” they’d insist. “Now we want it carried out.”
I find this striking for two reasons. Firstly, I’m struck by how greatly I underestimated people’s commitment to Brexit. The European Union has never been a defining issue for me. I voted and argued for the Remain position in 2016 not because of a deep love for the EU, but because a strong Tory government, supported by the vile toad Farage, leading an ideological Brexit felt unconscionable. But my political priorities and commitments have always been broader than a nation-state’s membership of a trading bloc, and my opposition to Brexit was always rooted in the fact that it was, from the very beginning, a self-serving establishment manoeuvre inflected by racism and ethno-nationalism, rooted in deep anti-migrant sentiment and mawkish post-Imperial melancholy. (See Angela Mitropoulos’s excellent essay in New Socialist for a sound critique of so-called ‘left’ arguments for stricter border regimes.) And as the whole farce unfolded, with the government first unable to negotiate a withdrawal deal, then unable to get it through Parliament (not to mention the #FBPE antics from the other side: there are whole future dissertations to be written on the unfortunate phenomenon of ‘EU Supergirl’, for example), it all just seemed like a trivial distraction from the accelerating social, ecological, and cultural collapses heralded by the manifold crisis of capitalism. A manifesto like Labour’s, with its promise of a better life regardless of EU membership status, would surely be seen as sweet relief both from the pantomime of Brexit and the worsening of conditions for so many. I was wrong about that. Enough people in enough key seats cared more about leaving the EU than about anything else—including their own material interests. Perhaps they thought their needs would be met once Brexit had Got Done™. Perhaps they found it difficult to imagine a society so radically different from the one in which we presently struggle. Perhaps their sole point of political engagement was Brexit—a single-issue voter can’t be persuaded by appeals to other issues.
This brings me on to my second point. What struck me about the stories I heard, over and again, of people knocking on doors and being met by people rigidly committed to Brexit is the understanding of democratic political participation implicit in the statement, ”I’ve already had my say, and now I want it carried out.” One vote, three and a half years ago, on a poorly-explicated and abstract concept, is taken as the final word. I’ve come to think of this as a Platonic conception of politics, in which perfectly-formed ideas, policies, positions float around abstractly in some sort of Realm of Forms, just waiting to be perceived, plucked out, and deployed by those who rule us. This is connected to the conception of politics as a form of shopping, where the task of the ‘citizen’ is to select the most suitable product from the shelves. These voters, then, have purchased one (1) Brexit®, and would like to receive the goods for which they have paid. That it’s something of a mystery box is of no matter: they want their bargain fulfilled, and who can blame them? This view of the political is not limited to Brexit voters—it has in been in noticeable effect within the Labour left since the election result—and there’s no One Weird Trick that can get around it.
Perhaps Labour would have won if it had adopted a Brexit policy that was similar to that of the Conservatives. But such a policy would likely never have made it through conference, and would only have represented a fraction of the membership. Other suggestions I’ve seen—e.g. ‘we’d have won if we’d charmed voters with racist dogwhistles and anti-migrant policies’—are beneath contempt. Not only are they founded on a set of syllogistic assumptions (and, without the full data, they can only be assumptions)—that all working class people are white and racist, that all voters north of the Cotswolds are working class, and that all working class people vote Labour; thus meaning all working class Labour voters are white racists—they are also profoundly patronising and ethically bereft. The task of a socialist movement is not to make some Faustian pact with the forces of racist reaction just so that we can have a little bit of power, as a treat. If we grant the assumption that the election was lost owing to Labour voters switching to the Conservatives, and the subsequent assumption that all of these swing voters were working class, the suggestion seems to be that working class people don’t know their own minds. The notion that we can be tricked or persuaded by some sleight-of-hand—that working class people aren’t capable of assessing their priorities and voting in accordance with them—is hideously Fabian and incredibly insulting. People can and do make their own decisions—even when we disagree with them. The task is not to become better salespeople, but to consider what needs are being met in the making of those choices, and think about how we might meet them. Perhaps, then, I’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Perhaps the question I should be asking is this:
People chose cruelty. What do we do now?
On what we do now.
No sooner do I pose the question than I complicate it. There are, as far as I can tell, three ‘moments’ to the question of what we do now: the personal, the political, and the Parliamentary. These three moments all overlap & intertwine, of course (all things are delicately interconnected), but for the sake of discussion, let’s take them one at a time, and in reverse order. I’m sure there are lots of other possibilities that I’ve missed, or that I’m not aware of—these are just some ideas that have emerged from my own reflections over the past few weeks.
The Parliamentary.
Parliamentary politics isn’t everything—but it is something. That is to say, it should never be the limit of our politics, never the sole ground which is being contested; but it does need to be reckoned with. For me, there are three compelling reasons to engage with the Parliamentary process. Firstly, a left wing government could, with a few strokes of a pen, solve so many problems on a huge scale that organisers and activists are currently burning themselves out trying to mitigate on an individual basis. Housing is a fine example of this—the amount of labour required just to get local authorities to meet their obligations to specific individuals is unsustainable. Anybody who’s spent any amount of time organising will likely have experienced activist burnout, either first-hand or through supporting a comrade. For me, I grew sick of watching comrades make themselves unwell trying to gain very small, temporary victories—not to mention the concerns I had around the ways this type of labour enables the state to launder its failure to meet needs. I started to feel that the difference between my organising activity and the vaunted ‘Big Society’ was a few badges and zines—and that’s almost certainly of vanishing importance to the architects of austerity, whose only interest is to keep the evidence of their murderous policies away from public view.
The second reason is to do with imperialism, and here I’ll try and be quite brief. The crimes of the British state during the period of active empire were many, varied, and frequently genocidal. We as a society need to reckon with this, and we need to make reparation for what we have done. (Recommended reading here: How the West Came to Rule; The History Thieves; The Blood Never Dried; Britain’s Empire; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.) Given that those crimes were primarily committed by the British state and its agents (though as citizens of a nation-state whose cities and institutions are built on plundered wealth and the stolen labour of enslaved people, we all benefit), those who choose to represent the state must be held accountable for the actions of the system they have chosen to administer. Parliament, then, must be used as a tool towards its own dismantling, and the dismantling of the imperialist British state. State-level crimes must be accounted for by state-level consequences. To suddenly disappear the one institution that holds ultimate responsibility seems to me to let the state off the hook. There’s a contradiction in engaging in Parliamentary processes as an anti-imperialist, sure—but there’s a contradiction in being a citizen of the UK. We’re always already compromised, and that’s a reason for action, not against it.
The third and final reason is a more personal one. I joined the Labour Party at the time of the Owen Smith leadership challenge because I saw in the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership a real chance to push things to the anti-imperialist left. I’m from a very left-wing family background that has always voted Labour; I voted Labour twice (2001 and 2010—in 2005 I didn’t vote, and in 2015 I was living in Scotland and voted Scottish Green), but had never until that point felt that the Labour Party could welcome me or my political commitments. With McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor I finally saw somebody in a position of relative power who represented me—my needs, my hopes, my dreams; the sort of world in which I wanted to live. Moreover, as I mentioned above, I’ve witnessed the deep transformation and political awakening that the Corbyn era has catalysed in so many people I know. For so many people, Parliamentary politics is their one point of engagement with the political process. Why would we not try and meet those people where they are? Why would we not carry the light forwards?
With all that said, here’s what I reckon:
Join the Labour Party (or don’t quit yet) by January 20.
Back a left wing candidate in the upcoming leadership elections (Rebecca Long-Bailey is my choice; read her launch pitch in Tribune.)
Agitate for open selections and full party democracy, so that we never again have to stand in the pissing rain trying to convince people to vote for a candidate who is at best useless and at worst an embarrassing liability (Neil Coyle, come on down!).
Get involved with your local CLP and/or the Community Organising Unit.
Focus on local government—as Tom Blackburn has noted, many Labour councils “are still largely the domain of the party’s right and centre”, and are mostly quite rubbish. This may well have led to the strange confusion on the doorstep around Labour being in power: were people attributing the rubbishness of their councils to the Parliamentary party?
The political.
So if Parliamentary politics isn’t everything, what else is there? I want to begin by unfolding the way in which I have come to conceive of ‘the political’. To offer a simple definition (and to try and avoid getting caught up in technical points of philosophy): politics, for me, is what happens between us. It is what we do, together (and in a shared world, we’re always together); it is how we relate to one another individually, collectively, and institutionally; it is connected to what Ricœur calls “the dialectic of love and justice”¹ (I wrote more about this here, in the context of being unwell); it is about response-ability—how we respond to, and bear witness to, one another. The word ‘political’ derives from the Ancient Greek πόλις (pólis)—a term that, in Classical Athens, referred to both the shared space of the city, and the shared collective identity of the body of citizens (what we might call a ‘community’). To be political, then, is to be of the pólis: part of a shared world. For Classical Athenians (and indeed the inhabitants of other Hellenic city-states), participation in these shared worlds was conditional and strictly delimited by the borders of the pólis, as well as by various internal social borders such as gender, status, birthplace, class position, and bloodline—conditions which will not be unfamiliar to witnesses of the present socio-political moment. But what if the the pólis was everywhere? Hannah Arendt offers a reading of the pólis as a “space of appearance”; the pólis, she writes, ““is not the city-state in its physical location [but] the organisation of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.”² My engagement with Arendt remains critical, but when I first encountered this notion, 5 years ago, I was immediately captivated. The idea of a political space that exists because we do; that is not reliant on regimes of exclusion, nor on fixed institutions, nor even on anointed leaders handing down wisdom and instruction from on high helped me make sense of the ways I’d been trying to navigate the world. Politics is not (only) what is done to the people—it is what the people do. (I suppose my reading of Arendt here is a Maoist one, which is hilarious, and which she would hate. Soz, Hannah.) So when I talk about the political moment of post-election activity, I’m talking about the things that we can do in spite of and against the institutions of Parliament.
As I noted above, for many people, Parliament is the sole arena of politics. One might speculate that this disjuncture between political processes and the meeting of needs is what has led us to the current situation—there’s more chance of getting your needs met by a mystery box than by a set of processes that has failed you over and again. And this narrowed conception of politics, which often arises out of disempowerment, also reproduces disempowerment. If you’re relying on one set of lofty fuckers who seem to spend their days lolling around on leather benches in some weird fake castle to meet your needs, you’re alienated from your own power and that of your communities. If those same lofty fuckers fail, repeatedly, to meet your needs—if the one glimmer of agency you’re permitted, the ballot box, produces no effects whatsoever—then you’re almost entirely cut off from being able to be an active participant in your own life. If we want to improve conditions for ourselves and those with whom we share this world, we cannot limit ourselves to Parliamentary activity, nor to other forms of institutionalised governance. The good news is, this means that one election defeat is not the movement-ending catastrophe that pontificating clowns of all ideological stripes seem to be deeply invested in having us believe it is!
Political education is going to be so important; of equal importance will be the direct meeting of needs, and a strong resistance to all forms of oppression—from the hostile environment to austerity, climate change, police harassment, and the persecution of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. There are going to be a lot of people who are struggling. When we act politically, we are acting together, discursively (we don’t always have to agree!), and towards a form of organisation. In this, we have much to learn from Black, Indigenous, and other forms of anticolonial struggle. In Chile, where at the time of writing people have been on the streets for 86 days (and counting), in the face of brutal military repression, comrades are organising community pharmacies, non-marketised food distribution, and so much more. The Black Panther Party can teach us a great deal about meeting the needs of our communities—their Free Breakfast Program remains an inspiration (we’re hoping to start something similar up in North London this year). In the north-western US, the Marilyn Buck Abolitionist Collective offer free breakfasts, childcare, bike and vehicle repairs, community meals, legal advice, and direct political education. Host a community meal, or help out at a community kitchen. Join a trade union; join a renters’ union. Start an anti-raids group; start a reading group; put on gigs and film screenings and talks (I’ll come and speak!); make zines. Make community. To repurpose the only useful bit of Kant: treat people not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. Share your experiences with others on Twitter, or Insta, or via. the New Socialist Activists’ Inquiry. Most of all, talk to people about what they need, and listen when they tell you. The process of reconnecting with our own agency is radically transformative. To paraphrase Marx, writing in 1871:
We must have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple [by decree of the people]. We know that in order to work out our own emancipation, we will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and ourselves.
If you’re not sure where to begin, Libcom’s Organising Toolkit is a very useful resource!
The personal.
In the aftermath of the election, I found myself overwhelmed with feelings of disappointment, misery, frustration, grief, humilation, and shame. Shame, yes—at having dared to hope for more, at having had the audacity to imagine that survival and flourishing might become something other than a luxury commodity to be coveted from afar. I blamed myself for this wanting; for setting myself up to fail, for being naïve, for not understanding how people felt or what they wanted. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, I stayed in bed for days, until my Christmas cactus saved me. I needed to be replenished, to allow some quietness and space into my heart. And, as ever, when I am in need of restoration, I return to the notion of gentleness. In the words of the late Anne Dufourmantelle (who sacrificed her own life to rescue some children who were swimming in unsafe waters):
If the attention of gentleness, in the sense intended by [Jan] Patočka as “care for the soul,” beckons to our responsibility as human beings toward the world around us, toward the beings making up this world and even toward the thoughts we commit to it, then gentleness is part of an intimate connection to animality, to the mineral, the vegetal, the stellar.³
Gentleness draws me out of my inward-circling spiral of shame and wrong-feeling; it reconnects me to everything that is and isn’t me: the intertwining, the ever-unfolding co-creation of all things. It reminds me that, as Dōgen Zenji wrote, 780 years ago, “this entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows. Flowing is like spring.”⁴ Spring is a time of renewal, of hope, of beauty—but all of these things imply their own passing. In Japan, where Dōgen was born and spent most of his life, spring is inextricably associated with 桜 (さくら; sakura)—the flowering of the cherry blossoms, which bloom briefly and then, a few days later, fall and float quietly, magically to the ground. There are so many cherry trees—planted solely for this fleeting experience—that the petals drift in soft pink clouds. There’s even a word for it: 桜吹雪 (さくらふぶき; sakurafubuki), or ‘cherry blossom snowstorm’. (As an aside, isn’t it perfect how the kanji for sakura—桜—seems to depict falling blossoms? On the left of the character, there’s the ‘tree’ ideograph: 木. Then, next to it, there’s the character for ‘woman’: 女. Finally, three dashes that look to me like blossoms tumbling from the tree as somebody stands, enchanted, beneath.) Flowing is like spring: no sooner do the blossoms appear than they fall; but, before they fall, the leaves have budded and unfurled. Dōgen again:
You may suppose that time is only passing away, and not understand that time never arrives. Although understanding itself is time, understanding does not depend on its own arrival. People only see time’s coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that the time-being abides in each moment… Arriving is the moment of casting off the body; not-arriving is the moment of being one with just this, while being free from just this…⁵
All of which to say—it isn’t over. We may be in the depths of winter now, but beneath our feet, bulbs are stirring silently; and somewhere, there’s a cherry tree whose sap is rising, who is gathering her strength for the coming bloom. “There is nothing in the real world,” writes Alfred North Whitehead,
which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling: and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality… what has been thus originated publicly pervades the world.⁶
Conditions can be shifted, circumstances changed, opportunities created—collectively and affectively. How we feel matters. If we’re panicked and angry and confused and afraid, perhaps we’ll lash out at one another; perhaps we’ll direct our energies into causes that are wrong, all wrong, just for the sake of something to do. Perhaps—and many Left Celebs seem to have chosen this path—we’ll pivot towards left nationalism in hopes of salvaging some sort of media career; or we’ll post sour multi-part Twitter threads on everything Corbyn and McDonnell did wrong, and why, needless to say, we had the last laugh. Perhaps we’ll abandon all hope, lay waste to everything we said we wanted, just a few weeks ago. I don’t think any of these paths are particularly generative. Instead, I’ve tried to encourage myself to practice patience, serenity. (Things are not all that out of control.) To reject the instant gratification model of political contestation and commit myself instead to a slower sort of temporality. To remember that, as Nick Estes puts it, “liberation [isn’t] a one-off event, a single action, or a moment.”⁷ This is plant work, flower work, tree work, mole work.
In the concluding segment of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx alludes, briefly, to the figure of an old mole. Misremembering a quote from Shakespeare, he likens the process of revolution to the measured, unassuming tunnelling of a mole beneath the ground. This idea of revolution as a process rather than an event (or even a series of events occurring sequentially, teleologically, at regular intervals on a linear and historically-comprehensible timescale) is so important. A 2007 essay by Daniel Bensaïd returns beautifully to the mole as a means of understanding the present conjunction. And Estes too, to my great delight, picks up on the figure of the mole—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the conditions against which Indigenous people on Turtle Island have had to and still must struggle. He writes:
The mole… burrows through history, making elaborate tunnels and preparing to surface again. The most dramatic moments come when the mole breaks the surface: revolution. But revolution is a mere moment within the longer movement of history. The mole is easily defeated on the surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work. Lakotas revere the mole for her hard work collecting medicines from the roots underfoot. During his campaign against US military invasion, to protect himself Crazy Horse collected fresh dirt from mole mounds. Because he knew it to contain medicines, he washed his body with the dirt. Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant tunnelling, plotting, planning, harvesting, remembering, and conspiring for freedom—the collective faith that another world is possible—is the most important aspect of revolutionary work. It is from everyday life that the collective confidence to change reality grows, giving rise to extraordinary events.⁸
So, live. Have joy and faith and hope against the crushing logic of the present regimes. Be gentle. Do the things that nourish you, that help you practice patience. (For me, reading, writing, making things with my hands; walking, tending a garden, lying on my back and letting my eyes follow a spider as she makes her way across the ceiling.) Pay soft attention to the small and quiet and lovely things. Be with people who are kind to you; find community wherever you can, and use it for good. Sleep. Talk about everything: your feelings, your worries, your hopes, your difficulties. Our vulnerability is our strength. Our love and our solidarity can, will, does shift conditions, collectively and affectively. Follow Gary Younge’s exhortation to “Imagine a world in which you might thrive… And then fight for it.” Imagine a world in which we all might flourish, together, and then let’s build it, as much as we can, little by little, one heap of earth at a time. Because, even when pushed back underground, we do not stop our work. “With slow impatience. And with hasty patience.”
These four years were not wasted. The revolution is long because it is total.
We have only just begun.
Footnotes.
Ricœur, Paul. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p.222
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.204
Dufourmantelle, Anne. 2018. Power of Gentleness. Translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé. New York: Fordham University Press, p.13
Dōgen Zenji. 1240. The Time-Being. Translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi. In Tanahashi, Kazuaki (ed.) Moon in a Dewdrop. New York: North Star Press, 1985, §14
ibid. §12, §18
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. New York: The Free Press, 1979, p.310
Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History is the Future. London: Verso, p.18
ibid. pp.18-9
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