The Cause

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. 

Categories

I have lived in the UK for 18 years of my life. I did my GCSE’s, my Highers, and my undergraduate degree here. My first bank account was opened here, it is in this country that I paid my first bills. For all intents and purposes and from a fiscal perspective, this is where I come from. As far as people are concerned that is not the case. People in the UK classify in part through accents; I have an accent that is mostly from the US, so to them that is where I must be from, where my allegiances must lie, where I must call home. Accent, however is only part of what makes a person, and really points to how one learned to speak. In most cases it can be said that one learns to speak in their home country, taught by their parents who also came from that country, but therein lies a few glaring omissions. Firstly it assumes that one always learns to speak in their so called ‘native’ setting, and secondly it assumes that people in their latter years cannot teach themselves to speak differently.

To clarify, none of that is true for me. I was born in a country that neither of my parents had a connection to, to parents who were born and raised in different countries to each other. When I moved to Scotland I was 15 years old, and as the years passed people made few if any remarks concerning my background or my supposed foreignness. It was only in the years leading up to Brexit that suddenly I became foreign again, and not only foreign, but a recently arrived foreigner. People ranging from passersby to work colleagues have made assumptions and asked questions that belied the fact that they thought I had just come to Scotland, and were always surprised or shocked to discover I had been here for what is now close to two decades. “But culturally, you are still American.”, they’d say.

Having said all of this, I experience an interesting almost reversal when I travel back to the EU or to other parts of the world. Suddenly, my skin colour comes first and THEN my accent. People, including those in official positions, assume I come, very recently, from an African country related to that European country’s colonial history. When I begin to speak in English, sometimes I see a change in demeanour. It can be a relaxing of muscles, a change in tone, a look. Once it took the form of the person I was speaking to suddenly becoming friendlier. It is almost as if to say their relief is embedded in the fact that I am not a source of guilt or discomfort for them, but for someone else. In the Middle East it is much more direct; people do not believe people who are brown come from anywhere but the African continent (and according Channel 4, Richard Spencer of US alt-right fame agrees). This has been the topic of many a fight with taxi drivers, both for myself and other friends. In recent years people have come to acknowledge that brown people (I refer to myself as brown rather than black for a list of reasons that could make for another paper) can come from other countries, but they must still be ‘originally African’ (which I find fascinating given the existence of Papua New Guinea and Australia). This idea that people who look like me can only be African is spreading despite the fact that we all know by now that identity has never been straight forward (not to mention what history has to say about this).

Ok let’s move on to Foucault. Everyone loves that guy right? He basically uses truth and the act of confession to argue that understanding who you are is just the beginning of a process of bringing who you are under control. Once a person is understood they can be categorised, and once they are categorised they can be put to use by the state. This is the essence of Technologies of the Self (and many of his other works), and one can see it reflected back in such things as forms, identity cards, and the way people interact. Returning to what I had said, once people hear my accent they interact with me on the basis of what they know about the US and what ‘Americans’ are supposed to be like, or if I am in for example the Middle East, people treat me the way they would an African. I cease to be relatable in some ways, and become ‘one of them’, an ‘Other’. The category, as a function of control, also allows for the divisions of people who could very easily find common ground. Divisions reinforce conflict, and conflict perpetuates inequality. To break that down, people use information about themselves and others to break people down into rough categories associated with things like gender, religion, and association to parts of the world based on skin colour. More recently, this has been operationalised by governments to identify people who are likely to be terrorists or refugees for example. This works because differences are highlighted, and people begin to believe in the rhetoric. They tell themselves “Of course that person is a terrorist/refugee. They are not like us.” or “They can’t be from here, they are so different.”   

This attitude has deep roots, and as a recent article in the Guardian has demonstrated, can be connected to the colonialist and imperialist history of the UK Europe and to some extent the US. Pankaj Mishra describes in the article ‘How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War’ how engrained in the popular psyche the idea of colonised peoples as inferior was, and how this was directly tied to the idea of the survival and expansion of Western countries. This is an idea that was not dismantled with the empire (and many would argue the empire has not been dismantled), allowing for a resurgence in the ideas of the right parties of various EU countries. To be clear again, I am not attacking the feeling of national pride and identity associated with a geographical area and the customs that have arisen in that bounded space, but I take issue with the violent hate of the supposed ‘Other’ that accompanies it. This is especially important as the world has an extremely long history of travelling peoples, a history which is not taught, and is left to people such as Pankaj Mishra and Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft to remind us, often on painful terms. So my question to all of us is this: can we not be nationalistic without the negative aggression? Does the complexity of identity, even within a given country, not make it futile to construct who you are on the basis of who you are not?

Reading List

Mishra, Pankaj, 2017. ‘How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war?CMP=share_btn_fb

Aitken, R & Rosenhaft, 2014. ‘Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884 – 1960’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Al Jazeera, 2014. ‘Black France: A Three Part Series Looking at the History of France’s Black Community and their Long Struggle for Recognition’, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/08/201382894144265709.html

Resourceful

I appreciated many things about Egyptian mythology. What I loved most was that the Earth wasn’t a woman. No need to cringe over the treatment of the great mother, raping her of resources, or the fracking of her crust. Geb, Father Earth, completed the cosmos where he met the sky.

To be clear, I appreciate the beauty of a benevolent Earth mother, a resplendent Gaia in pagan Spring. Humanity tends to feminize all things with a womb and use it without regard for consequences. The problem here is not metaphor, it’s that what we own, use and inhabit is somehow automatically feminine. What we use or own is often, also, abused.

Once land and people started to hold monetary value they often became resources. Wealth, class and race divided people into workforce and landowners. In The Ascent of Woman Dr. Amanda Foreman notes the Code of Hammurabi was the first time that humanity defined women's limitations. Empires and households traded women for being able to produce more human capital. The only advantage to being a wealthy womb was a life of leisure as you despaired over the production of a male heir. The poor wombs not only had to produce enough humans to work the land, but also labor of their own to worry over. In either case, society tied women’s value to domesticity, birth or sex.

There’s a twisted symmetry to it. Outside of their ability to produce, resources have little value. Consequences to the resources themselves are only considered when they affect others. Consider how de/regulation follows a high death toll or the halt of a production line. It matters little if resources are sickly, as long as they can still make more. Endanger that and owners will make changes. Human greed or neglect is rarely to blame for dwindling resources. In fact, scarcity often leads to a greater control over any given resource. If there is only so much crude oil left, might as well make the most profit from what remains. It’s so much more valuable when it’s rare, after all.

A resource doesn’t have the ability to offer consent. Women themselves choosing when not to give birth is a political hotbed in every country. Women become lobbyists, activists or politicians and raise their voices. Yet congresses and parliaments ignore them as if they had no voice. Women and the Earth are useful in their bounty and wasteful unless they produce value.

It’s disturbing how humanity resorts to exploitation, and not only of the women of the Earth. All is insubstantial to the power of profit and woe to those who are essentially, valuable. Money can raise lobbies, think tanks, campaigns, and court rulings to protect profit. It is lawful for the Earth, women, LGBTIQ persons, people of color, the poor, and others to be resources. Global climate, economic and human rights agreements are attempts to curb centuries of abuse. A global wealthy white minority continues to reinforce and support these practices.

Harassment is on the international stage these days. It’s the everyday act of exerting power over someone who is vulnerable. They are not always women, but it is the women that humanity somehow finds the most difficult to believe. There are many countries where a woman's word is suspect, but the idea alone is devastating. How often is one accusation of harassment or rape enough? How many wealthy celebrities did it take to take down a Weinstein? Wealth, once again, does not protect those who have wombs. It was Alianza Nacional de Campesinas who sounded the weariest support. Farmworkers are no stranger to exploitation and harassment:

“We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society in isolated fields and packinghouses that are out of sight and out of mind for most people in this country. Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack.

The kind of thinking that leads to exploitation has consequences. Where and to whom we assign profit and value is racist and gendered. Worst of all, those who suffer from scarcity and abuse often disappear. Disaster favors the prepared and very few of us have the wealth or the insurance to recover from it. We dismiss those we lose to starvation and death in Appalachia, Sudan or Yemen. It’s always the strong that survive, isn’t it?

Reckless development as misogyny is more pernicious. The Earth is lying there, daring to be plentiful and lush. Drill baby, drill. Rape analogies for the Earth should make corporate development horrifying, but they don't. Horrifying because rape is horrifying. Horrifying because it drives people from their homes. Horrifying because it floods land and sea in toxic crude oil. Horrifying because it affects us all, gendered or not.

The earth is a celestial body. It possesses no gender, has no need to perform a societal role. It simply is. Humans still can’t seem to move beyond societal roles even if they shift over time. It has not benefitted more than half of humanity to be only as valuable as what they produce between their legs. It has not benefitted the earth to be only as valuable as its ability to sustain humanity. Identity and how we treat one another should no longer depend on biology or gender. There are ancient, systemic problems with how we value gender and production. We cannot solve equality or poverty overnight. So, I have a simple request to start the process: reconsider how you decide what or who is valuable. We can’t ask the earth how it would prefer we see it, but we can certainly ask one another.