I had a sort of debate recently about the role that "academic leftists" can play in "the Revolution." I'm glad I had it because it, in tandem with various recent experiences and my thoughts over the past several months (and also past 4 1/2 years since I went back to school), helped me know where I stand. I'm burned out on self-styled "radicals" who are themselves products of at least some time in college and whose rhetoric reflects a sort of academic-activist persona, while at the same time, they have such disdain for what we do in these colleges and universities. Their position seems to be that we who teach are uniquely responsible for not bringing on the Revolution. As someone new to teaching (and still so idealistic about it) - and as someone with a low income who struggled for years - this irritates me, but my personal situation isn't the point. What bothers me is this need to attack the work of people who are trying to do what they can in their own lives and sphere of work. And what bothers me most is the impulse to unravel what is already being attacked by the Right because it isn't perfect enough - to hurt people whose work pushes against capitalist logic and sometimes shines a light on what could be, if we transform the system.
But I have some sympathy for those who interrogate academia and its teachers because I have felt a version of this myself at times. I have swung between intense idealizing of what is possible in education and so much anguished anger that our institutions in this country haven't done better. I have asked some of the same questions. Why is it that most of the people who run things have college degrees - have been exposed to all these progressive, powerful ideas - and yet go on to run things in ways that hurt so many humans and other beings? That is basically what I asked and tried to explore in the directed study paper I did my first semester back at the U, when I returned to finish my B.A. I think that those kinds of questions are worth asking and trying to answer.
But the answer is not that academics are in a stated or even in-practice kind of conspiracy to keep everyone else down and keep knowledge away from the masses, as some of these supposed radicals assert. The answer is not that college teachers just aren't suffering enough, and if they had to go back out and work for Walmart or whatever other shitty job, they would somehow FEEL their class-consciousness and anger on a deep enough level to MAKE that Revolution happen NOW, damn it. For that matter, 75 percent of college teachers are not tenured, have little hope of ever being tenured, and are often living on terribly low wages working most of their waking hours. But FEELING upset and even speaking or writing about it does not in itself bring on a Revolution.
People who think that suffering 'more' in itself makes someone more 'revolutionary' deeply misunderstand the nature of the structure of capitalism. And when they attack other workers who they should be enacting solidarity with, they cause more fractures that make mass collective efforts more difficult. They spread a stupid form of envy - a kind all too similar to the envy Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to elicit when he held up their state workers as examples of people who had more than the lowest paid workers there. Competing for who has it worse is a race to the bottom. And U.S. workers can't "win" that competition, because they still have it better than so many of the lowest paid workers or the destitute around the world. So these pointless efforts to pretend to have a morally superior position based on having less "privilege" than another U.S. worker are destructive. They participate in the Capitalist strategy to always play workers against each other. They imply that moralism is the answer, when it is the structure of capitalism that creates these disastrous effects.
I am not going to compete with people for who has experienced the most misery or who is most exploited. I am not going to chase misery to attain some kind of purism. It's sick and it's counterproductive. I am also not going to organize with people who think that any solid gain in real people's lives is somehow a sell-out because it's "only" a "reform" and not the Revolution. This either / or thinking is childish and it reveals a lack of deep concern with actual people's lives. If our lives RIGHT NOW do not matter, why would any future person's life matter? We all only have the lives we have. We should be doing all that we can to make them matter, and to try to help other people to also have good lives. All of this can be done as part of our push to transform the system.
People who believe that finding some happiness stands in the way of the Revolution - people who believe that we must all somehow suffer "equally" as if such a thing could be possible - people who believe that if anyone is not suffering enough, that person won't enact solidarity with others and push for better - these people end up embracing a kind of masochism. How would they propose to fight for better job conditions and living wages for people if they believe that when people achieve those gains, they will be less likely to oppose capitalism? I believe that fighting for better lives and actually winning some gains moves people forward. But if they believe that relentless misery is the path, then that logic means they should do what they can to be sure that everyone lives in the most awful conditions possible. Then whoever survives can bring on the Revolution, right?
So for me... there has been a certain shift in my thinking. Not so much in my actual personality - I have always laughed a lot, been absorbed in following my interests, tried to live in ways that made me happy on a deep level to the extent that those choices were available to me. But there is a shift in my ideas, and maybe it will mean a shift in my writing. I don't mean to say I'm going to start writing sappy self-satisfied gratitude journals or write a bunch of empty 'positive-thinking' stuff. I will be as outraged and anguished as I have always been about the decimation of the planet, the corruption, the pain heaped onto so many people by an elite class that lives off the backs of others AND by a system that makes almost all of us in this country live off of the backs of even more exploited people. But I am not going to literally or metaphorically slash my wrists open to lay myself out on some altar of misery as if that would somehow shame the system or would make others who do care and who do suffer somehow FEEL enough pain to 'DO' something. No... I am going to do what I can to take care of myself and others.
Yesterday was the birthday of the great poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde, and while she was living with cancer, doing her best to stay strong and stay alive, she wrote (in A Burst of Light):
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
That is true at all times in our lives, not only when we are trying to fend off a terminal illness. Caring for ourselves, individually and collectively, should be the foundation for what we do.
I have been talking about Thoreau with my students, and that too has deeply affected me lately. Thoreau has always kind of 'saved' me. I love his writings. Near the end of Walden, he wrote:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.htmlI can think of critiques of this advice. There is poor, and then there is POOR. Gazing from an outsider’s perspective on the lives of destitute people, Thoreau’s solutions sometimes reveal an insensitivity to the realities of their lives. But they simultaneously reveal such an acute sensitivity to those same people living those lives. He sees value in our lives as they are, rather than only as they would be in some perfected situation (which we never arrive at). We do not have to see ourselves as pitiful. We can experience joy and beauty in some of our lived moments; we can be attentive to joy and beauty so as not to miss them.
And thus, at the risk of sounding trite and self-satisfied, I am going to admit to myself and others that I love and cherish my life. I feel good waking up most mornings. I feel excited for the day. I love the people in my life, and I am absorbed by so much of what I do. But even if I were working some of the lousy jobs I did in the past or were horribly stressed out and unhappy with my situation, on some level, I hope I would love my life and other people's lives.
I’m still thinking about what that means. How can we be expected to love our lives if they’re miserable? It seems that Thoreau is telling us to love our very existence – to love whatever it is coursing through our bodies and consciousness that means that we’re alive, right now, and to attend to that with all the curiosity, sorrow, care, and joy for all that we see, feel, and understand through the unique experience of our one life. For me, that is why I teach, write, study, plant gardens, walk, and embrace my relationships with people I like and love. The Revolution I hope for is one that will be made by people who are driven by love for our lives. Maybe any collective effort to change our workplaces, our education systems, our laws, our society, our relationships, and our personal situations – maybe the way for those efforts to move dramatically forward is for them to be forged out of that love for our lives.
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