Here at The Turn Left, we’ve thought a lot about causes. Name one and we’ve mulled over it, gotten involved in it, attended conferences on it, or penned scholarly papers about it. No matter what it is, it’s in a long line and someone from the cause in front likely said, “Wait your turn”. You know the activists I mean: the environmentalists who don’t think it’s the right moment for LGBTQ+ rights or LGBTQ+ activists who refuse to acknowledge misogynoir.
So, we decided to have a 'chat' about causes. Are they really mutually exclusive?
Myriam: The more time I spend in cause-based life, the more I find that whatever rifts come between activists have only somewhat to do with The Cause. We recreate the idea that there is so little space, money, time, or resources that it is impossible to truly share equally. This is the lie our institutions tell us and precisely the lie we fight when we ask for equal rights or safety for minorities.
Inevitably, when passionate people come together, they disagree. In activist communities those disagreements become huge debates over white privilege or misogyny—both of which do play huge roles in how we speak to each other and decide what actions to take. I find that we hide personal spats behind the big ideas. Sometimes, it really is a simple failure of humanity between colleagues that no one apologizes for. Sometimes, it’s a betrayal of one cause for another. More often, it’s both.
Every time, however, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. I always find myself relieved to be in an activist space in the beginning. The political correctness eventually does start to flake off after long hours painting signs. Each time I find myself asking: Why do we still believe the lie?
Sandra: I see what you mean about this idea that resources are perceived as limited. This could be a holdover from the 'spaceship Earth' idea touted by Buckminster Fuller (see Adam Curtis’ documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace), but I think it also makes us realise that HOW terms and concepts come about is also problematic. For example people have to identify under the term 'minority' for their grievances to be legitimised in the eyes of large bodies such as the government (see the work of Saba Mahmood).
Buckminster Fuller had to convince people to think of Earth as a self-contained ship in space just so that people would start being more environmentally conscious (or so Adam Curtis tells us in All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace). I think activists don't always educate themselves outside their given cause, adding to your point and making it easier to keep things personal. There's nothing wrong with being personally attached to the cause you are pursuing; I prefer that to people who are just 'there', but it is super important to do the background reading. That enables you to see how things are interconnected and maybe avoid this hiding of personal spats behind big ideas.
At the same time I think the latter point may involve an element of selflessness people do not always possess. We are living in an age where people have the freedom to express themselves in new and different ways (and reap the sometimes horrifying consequences), but what I find myself wondering often is how to translate that expression into action that those in power will actually respond to. We get very bogged down in the details of what and how we want things to change for our given cause, and in so doing fail to see the commonalities with other causes. So maybe the problem is that there is so much information out there that people do not always realise the ways in which resources are not limited? Maybe it is also the argument made about people becoming trapped in their own bubbles and not actively seeking people who have different ideas?
Myriam: I agree, there’s a lot of history and theory that goes alongside movements. I am worried here, though, about the division between those who read and those who do not read. Movements often prize those with education over others and it doesn’t always protect the movement from division. Those leaders should be careful what knowledge is treasured and not allow their movements to be divided along lines of privilege.
To be clear, I’m not looking down my nose at reading. I don’t know where I’d be without the books I’ve had access to. I just want to keep in mind that book-learnin' is yet another way we divide our efforts. There are many different ways to learn and we should use them all. Chief among those is empathy. How many training manuals are there out there for empathy? I know the works of Paolo Freire and bell hooks aren’t chiefly concerned with empathy but there must be others like them whose work has been translated into dozens of languages.
There are a lot of bubbles and echo chambers. We should have more exposure to different models of governance and organization…and find ways to build consensus properly. We are socialized to seek hierarchy, to reproduce hierarchy. Or even that the best will naturally rise to the top, to trust in the meritocracy. We dive deep into our causes because we have seen that this is not true: we don’t all start life with equal chances at success so how can we really tell who is the best?
We need to train ourselves to think differently, to plan differently. It scares me how difficult it is for me to break those simple patterns in my own work. Who can we learn from?
Sandra: This can be dangerous territory as this is how some people see the divide between left and right extremes in the US—those that read and those that don’t. I am not saying that this is what you are talking about, but I just wanted to be clear for our readers’ sakes. I wonder though—if everyone read to atleast a certain minimum, would we still call it a hierarchy or try to pursue one? What if we ensured that everyone read the same things or atleast the same variety of things?
Absolutely reading is not the only way to learn—knod at Tim Ingold and embodied learning (see his book The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill)—but sometimes when people have different experiences based on, for example, skin colour it may be a medium that has to be relied on. There are still some experiences people cannot have, and that is where both reading and talking to people can be helpful. In that sense, what if we all knew how to build/make things? What if we engaged in more projects that involved learning through doing/experiencing alongside people who were different to us in some way?
I agree entirely that there should not be a division between those who read and those who do not, and there may be a bit of ego that needs to be overcome there. There is an assumption that people cannot communicate or that if they can they can do so only to certain point. So how do we overcome this? And what about how people divide themselves over causes? I admit I have my moments of preferring animals and environmental work over working with humans, but that has yet to stop me from working with humans. How do we get to a point where the majority of people can see the overlaps between the environment, the feminist struggle, struggles of peoples of colour and so on until the end of the list?
Because it is all bound up in the personal, what people have read, and what they believe the world to be. It may also boil down to what some are willing to do in the realm of acceptability. There is what people do so others see them doing it, and what people do and think for themselves...aand suddenly we find ourselves in the territory of morals and values which is a whole other conversation.
Myriam: Practically, I think we have to start making cooperative spaces. We have to train ourselves to think differently. That may mean expanding our realm of experience with other people’s stories, written or otherwise. That may mean actually taking or crafting courses that focus on building consensus and facilitation. Learn from the moments in history where goals and leadership were shared rather than the moments they all fell apart.
Personally, I’ve wanted to learn more about federations of the First Nations such as the Iroquois and other systems of governance. There is more to history than what happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. Not to discredit the classics, mind you, we just need to create more space for the actual history of the WORLD.
Everyone I’ve ever met in politics or activism is tired of the way things are but so few take the extra step to make actual changes. In some ways, we need a complete system overhaul: decentralized leadership, mentorship, consensus building, and ALL the trainings. We have to learn what the new world can look like if we’re trying to build it. Boldly going blindly with only the status quo behind us is too slow going. For the poor, the marginalized, the economically vulnerable, we have no more time to waste.
Sandra: You know what? I think WE are the solution to this! In a serious vein though, what specifically would training ourselves to think differently look like? I think looking outside the histories taught in schools is crucial, especially as it enables us to think about the different ways we have come to be where we are socially and politically, and it reminds us that we are dealing with issues and modes of being that are not linear but hypercomplicated.
To push your points further, Greek and Roman history and philosophy have varying influences on global historical trajectories, and overshadow the impact of Indian, Arab, African (plural) and East Asian histories to name a few. Also, this ties back into your earlier points about empathy and destabilising hierarchy, which then ties into ongoing attempts to decolonize different institutions alongside decolonial projects. Moving towards existing groups and organizations, maybe it would be helpful for groups who target multiple ‘causes’ to re-stress the overlaps between all causes, to coax people out of their specific corners? To teach across and around rather than top down? Everyone IS tired, but in addition to not acting people often do not know how to act, or think their actions won’t make a difference anyway (another issue touched upon in an Adam Curtis documentary).
I sometimes think of it like a post-apocalyptic world: everything has been supposedly destroyed and torn down, but people still carry the structures and institutions of the ‘old’ world with them. They cling to them for a sense of stability and comfort. When I was a child I was asked to design my own country and government. So, how would we, as a plural, hybrid, hyper complicated people, design our own country? A system overhaul means stepping into the unknown and the potentially unknowable, but we can’t know where that boundary lies if we do not try to step across it.
