The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
—Noam Chomsky
In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.
—Czesław Miłosz
I was invited to give a talk at an “international anarchist convention” in Greece in 2011, and while I had a lovely correspondence with the rebels who’d organized the event, and they’d assured me that they would cover my airfare and put me up for a few days at one of their squats, I was skeptical—they were anarchists after all. But once I’d cleared customs and two skinny kids—frighteningly pierced and wildly tattooed, neon-colored hair flying haphazardly from their skulls—rushed me wearing vibrant rags and big welcoming smiles, I thought, Whatever. I was happy to be there.
We jumped on a bus and headed for one of the dicey districts of Athens, and they broke out a thermos of thick black coffee and a bag of Arab food, grease darkening the paper sack in a delicate Rorschach, and we dived eagerly in. They offered portions to our dubious fellow travelers—“We’re anarchists!” they proclaimed—and we chattered happily about plans for the week as they pointed out the ancient sights along the way.
“An anarchist convention,” I said, as we rolled through the city streets. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, like jumbo shrimp or Justice Roberts?” And a keynote speech seemed so unnecessarily hierarchical. “Are you sure you’re anarchists?” I teased. “Don’t be fooled,” one of them kidded back. “This is all a front for chaos and confusion. You’re one of our many props!”
The squat was beautiful—open windows and unlocked doors, assorted chairs in all manner of disrepair in the large commons area, pirated electricity and Internet, big pots of black beans and lentils bubbling away on a small black stove, and a huge salvaged wooden table overflowing with black bread, apples and cheese, olives, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs. Later that night I spoke to a large gathering at an arts college about our shared values of peace and popular justice, human agency and mass mobilization from below, and the importance of refusing to bow down to either gods or masters. I noted Mikhail Bakunin’s insight that freedom without socialism is a license for privilege and injustice, while socialism without freedom can become slavery and brutality, and I ended by saluting the great participatory tradition in Greece stretching back centuries and sustained by subsequent generations of Greek youth. Carry it on!
All of this was prelude to an encounter that is as vivid for me today as the moment it occurred, a story I’ve retold and relived many times since. Early the next morning I caught the fast boat from Piraeus to the faraway island of Paros where I was to spend the day with the legendary Manolis Glezos. We were introduced by mutual friends, and while you may not recognize the name, Manolis was the most respected (or reviled) man in all of Greece, and well known throughout Europe for a dazzling illegal act he committed in 1941. When he was still a teenager, Manolis had climbed the Acropolis with a friend and torn down and destroyed the Nazi flag that had flown over Athens since German occupation forces marched into the city a month earlier. This symbolic action (an act of terror according to the fascists) was magnified many times when the Nazis, determined to nip all opposition in the bud lest the virus of resistance spread, sentenced Manolis to death in absentia. When he was captured several months later, he was thrown into prison and tortured.
Manolis was ninety years old when we met up, a veteran of over seventy years of struggle for peace and justice—he’d been imprisoned by the German occupiers, the Italians, the Greek collaborators, and the Regime of the Colonels, adding up to more than a decade behind bars. He had been sentenced to death multiple times, charged with espionage, treason, and sabotage, and escaped prison more than once. He’d been the focus of widespread international protests and “Free Glezos!” campaigns on several occasions over the years, which surely explained why Manolis was still alive and standing at the dock waving happily when I arrived.
His broad smile emerged from his bushy white mustache and drove a deeper crease across his already-wrinkled face. He was wearing a loosely fitted coarse cotton shirt with pants to match, a beige scarf, and a light sports coat buttoned to the top. We embraced for a long moment, then turned and walked arm in arm to a café in the plaza.
Our walk was slow, for every person we passed—every one, no exception—greeted Manolis and presented a kiss or a handshake or a hug, and he offered an embrace or a word to each in return; it became the customary practice of our day together, and I assumed of his life all the time: he was a flesh-and-blood human being, to be sure, but he was simultaneously larger than life, a symbol and an icon. He bore the responsibility gracefully without being in its thrall, responding warmly to everyone he met but remaining as ordinary and earthbound and humble as anyone I’ve known.
I asked him about his time in the Greek Parliament and he said that each time he ran and particularly when he was elected it was always as part of a larger strategy, a useful tactic for him and his comrades at specific times but never an end in itself. “I’m interested in people collectively discovering their own power,” he said. “That’s an entirely different thing from an individual or a party in power.”
Manolis told me about the years when he was the elected president of the Community Council in Aperathu, an experiment in far-reaching participatory democracy. “We governed by consensus,” he said, “in a local assembly with forums reminiscent of the period of radical democracy in ancient Greece.” They abolished all privileges for elected officials, developed a written constitution, and challenged the idea that “experts” or professional politicians and self-proclaimed leaders were better at running the town’s affairs than ordinary people. “Every cook can govern!” was a kind of theme and watchword.
Manolis put his face close to mine and said with conspiratorial conviction, “The biggest obstacle to revolution here—and I’ll bet it’s true in your country as well—is a serious and often unrecognized lack of confidence.” I thought he made sense. “We spend our lives in the presence of mayors and governors and presidents and chiefs of police,” Manolis continued, “and then we lose our power of self-reliance, and we doubt that we could live without those authorities. We worship them in spite of ourselves, we may not mean to but we do, and soon enough we embrace our own passivity and become enslaved to a culture of obedience. That’s a core of our weakness. That’s something you and I must challenge and change.” We must unleash our most radical imaginations and push ourselves to break the straitjackets of conventional thinking. Yes! We must demand the impossible.
Manolis has been arrested by riot police in front of the Parliament building each year since our meeting, still living the activist life, still battling the murderous system of oppression and exploitation, still opening spaces for more participatory democracy, more peace, and more justice. I can see him in my mind’s eye now, waving cheerfully from the dock as I left later in the day—filled with energy and hope. Still demanding the impossible.
***
What if? That humble question might be the single spark that can ignite a massive prairie fire, provoking us to leap beyond personal speculation and into the vortex of political struggle and social action. This is how it’s always been; this is the world as we’ve always known it. But why is it so? Who benefits and who suffers? How did we get here and where do we want to go? What if we took a radically different angle of regard and questioned the insistent dogma of common sense? What if we unleashed our wildest imaginations? The “what if” question might then blow open the spectrum of acceptable possibilities and take us down a rabbit hole or up into orbit—onto one of life’s restless and relentless journeys, exploring and experimenting, orbiting and spinning, inventing and adapting, struggling toward knowledge and enlightenment, freedom and liberation, fighting to know more in order to do more.
What if? Copernicus and Galileo challenged the dogma of their day as they reimagined the movements of the heavenly bodies and the revolutions of the sun and the Earth. Virginia Woolf breathed in a revolutionary wave of women’s freedom and imagined a room of her own, signaling in lyrical words that everything henceforth would be new, and everything old immediately put on trial. John Coltrane heard free jazz—devout and large—inside his head before it burst like a shot through his horn and into our collective consciousness, and Lin-Manuel Miranda upended the Broadway stage as he reimagined the Founding Fathers as young Black and Latino revolutionaries, casting a bright light on the nation’s beginnings as well as a new perspective on contemporary struggles for self-determination and freedom. Each of these propulsive pioneers questioned the expected, changed the frame, and opened a space of possibility; each rose up in the company of others; each began with a revolutionary’s dream that pushed beyond the obvious and the settled, and evoked an alternative universe. And each reminds us that standing next to the world as it is, the world we might mistakenly take as immutable, we can discover or search out a wider range of possible worlds, that is, alternatives that could be or should be. Our common task is to face one another authentically and without masks, to tell our complex and various stories candidly, to break the suffocating stranglehold of common sense. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asked the poet Muriel Rukeyser. “The world would split open.” This is a call to go to the root, to question and seek evidence and to find alternatives, to speak our truths and to join together in the business of splitting the world wide open once more.
When “What if?” is taken up collectively it can be forged into a powerful tool with the potential to crack open the given world and provide previously unthinkable alternatives: “What would happen if we abolished slavery?” Boom! The runaways, the abolitionists, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman stoked a revolution, organizing and unleashing the agency of enslaved people everywhere and challenging the slaveocracy at its base—picture General Tubman with her laser-like focus and that small, discreet pistol in her pocket, leading the troops toward freedom. “What if we took the next step in the Black freedom movement?” Bam! Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Joanne Robinson, Septima Clark, and their comrades in the 1960s conceived of a revolution that could create—from a world of toil and trouble—a beloved community where Black people would be free and all of us could become equals before one another and the law. Today’s freedom fighters dare to proclaim once more that Black Lives Matter as they open a fresh space to join the unfinished revolution right here, right now.
***
Here, then, is a partial diagram of the known world, a rough sketch of what is, but certainly not a picture of what could be or should be:
Countless contradictions abound: appalling poverty and unprecedented wealth, acts of war and words of peace, liveliness and chronic social depression, hope and despair. Reality TV and then reality itself. It’s a land of wild diversity, extremes and opposites, conflict and contestation, moments of personal joy, happiness, and ecstasy against times of collective rage and anguish.
Still, the bullet points above—and I use the term deliberately—are pistol shots that represent a bright thread that is recognizable and knowable. The US juggernaut is headed for catastrophe, either a new and sophisticated—dare we say it?—form of friendly looking and familiar fascism, or some other form of extreme social disintegration. Another world is surely coming—greater equality, socialism, participatory democracy, and peace are all within our reach, but nuclear war, work camps, and slavery are also possibilities. There are still choices and options, and nothing is guaranteed. Where do we go from here? A season of light or a season of darkness? Chaos or community? Barbarism or socialism?
***
What if we initiated a bold truth-and-reconciliation process that reached back to the start—to the theft of Native lands and the mass destruction of First Nations peoples, to the horrors and the continuing afterlife of slavery, to the accumulation of wealth based on conquest and exploitation—and faced reality in the interest of repairing historical wrongs?
What if we broke from the dogma of militarism—rejecting the anemic and seemingly endless debates about whether the United States should bomb this country or instead boycott some other country on the State Department’s or Pentagon’s list of targets—and organized an irresistible social upheaval strong enough to stop US invasions and conquest. What if we occupied bases, blocked munitions shipments and private militias, boycotted arms dealers, sabotaged surveillance operations and drone manufacturers—and forced the US government to disarm and close all foreign military bases within a year? Is that unthinkable? Why? Or what if we built a colossal transnational movement that organized shadow elections (initially), inviting any resident of a country with a US military presence within its borders to vote in US national elections?
What if we stopped tinkering with the business of caging people and abolished the prisons altogether? Seriously. What else would have to change to make prison abolition conceivable? And why is it easier to imagine the end of the world (in movies and comics and novels) than it is to imagine the end of prisons? Or the end of capitalism?
What if we converted the American financial industry into a public utility, community owned and popularly managed? What if we demilitarized and disarmed the police forces and reorganized them under elected and transparent community boards? What if we linked arms with National Nurses United and allied health workers, took over hospitals and clinics, and barricaded the insurance and pharmaceutical profiteers in their offices as we built a powerful popular movement to create free universal health care for all? What if teachers, students, parents, families, and community members built one big union and seized the public schools in order to teach freedom, directing our efforts to the full development of each and all? What if we organized ourselves to create free, public neighborhood/community schools designed for the many, not the few—the privileged or the lucky or the elite—and took as a reasonable standard of support the generous average cost it took to educate the children of the last five US presidents? What if we successfully blockaded every fossil fuel drilling and fracking site? Or what if we took control of the top five energy corporations and placed them under popular control?
Questions like these might inspire quixotic daydreaming or curious conjecture, but what if instead they stirred us to create alternatives, to reach for the spectacular, and to get busy with projects of reframing and repair, movement-making, agitating, educating, community organizing, and action. Plunging into the debris we see all around us, swimming as hard as we’re able toward a distant and indistinct shore with courage and hope and love, overcoming difficulties and reimagining life’s possibilities along the way—this is the spirit these questions might unleash in each and all of us. The questions then grow into calls to action: Disarm! Abolish the prisons! Seize big pharma and big oil! Stop the cops! Smash white supremacy! Occupy the schools!
With a similarly provocative spirit, we might consider even more cosmic questions:
***
“All’s well,” says the town crier making rounds through the village and lighting lamps for the night. Perhaps it’s simply a reassuring thought for the townspeople, or perhaps there’s a more malevolent message, the toxic propaganda that the status quo is inevitable and that there is no alternative to the way things are. The dissident, the artist, the agitator, the dreamer, and the activist respond, “No, all is not well.” The current moment is neither immutable nor inescapable, and its imperfections are cause for general alarm—for the exploited and the oppressed the status quo is itself an ongoing act of violence.
Activists announce through their lives and their work that a new world is in the making. We can create a community of agitators and transform this corner of the world into a place that we want to inhabit. We can identify ourselves as citizens of a country that does not yet exist and has no map, and become that new nation’s pioneers and cartographers—and through our common actions bring a more assertive and vibrant public into being.
Each of us is immersed in what is, the world as such. In order to link arms and rise up we need a combination of somethings: seeds, surely; desire, perhaps; a vision of community and possibility; necessity and even, at times, desperation; willful enthusiasm and an acceptance that there are no guarantees whatsoever.
Imagination is indispensable in these efforts and pursuits because it “ignites the slow fuse of possibility,” as Emily Dickinson wrote. More process than product, more stance than conclusion, engaging the imagination involves the dynamic work of igniting that fuse, mapping the world as it really is, and then purposely stepping outside and leaning toward a possible world.
We may accept our lot in life as inevitable for decades, generations, even centuries, but when fresh and startling winds begin to blow and revolution is in the air, when a lovelier life comes into view for masses of people and a possible world becomes vaguely and then acutely visible—glimpses of which fill the pages that follow—at that moment, the status quo becomes suddenly, shockingly unendurable. This is the moment when we reject the fixed and the stable and begin to reach for alternatives. The imagination erupts. And nourishing our radical imaginations means traveling to the root of things, seeking causes and connections, while simultaneously struggling in the here and now for relatively more peace and equality, comparatively more joy and justice, an expanded field of hope.
Hope and fierce collective determination are choices; confidence is a politics. We don’t want to minimize the horror, but neither do we want to be sucked into its thrall. Hope is an antidote to cynicism and despair; it’s the capacity to notice or invent alternatives; it’s nourishing the precious sense that standing directly against the world as such is a world that could be, or should be. Whatever is the case stands side by side with what could be or should be the case. Without that vital sense of possibility, doors close, curtains drop, and we become stuck: we cannot adequately oppose injustice; we cannot act freely; we cannot inhabit the most vigorous moral spaces. We are never freer, all of us and each of us, than when we refuse the situations before us as settled and certain and determined—the absolute end of the matter—and break the chains that entangle us, launching ourselves toward the imaginable.
***
We need to make a distinction between personal virtues—be honest, do your work, and show up on time—and social or community ethics. Personal virtue is surely good, but we would be hard pressed to say that a slave owner who paid the bills on time and was loyal or kind to the children was an ethical person—the blithe indifference to the larger social context allows the rotten system itself to thrive. We need to think about how we act customarily and collectively, how our society functions, how the contexts of politics and culture and economics, for example, interact with what we hold to be good, and how an ethical society allows more of us more of the time to act ethically. Most of us, after all, mostly follow the prevailing conventions of our time and place—most Spartans acted like Spartans; most Athenians, like Athenians; and most North Americans, even those in quite different economic and social circumstances, and for better and for worse, act most often like North Americans. To be an ethical actor and a person of moral character in an unjust social order requires something more: to work in common to change that society, to rewrite its rules and its narrative, to come together with others in order to rise up and resist. It requires activists and agitators and artists and dissidents willing to take risks on behalf of something better. It’s obvious now (even if it was obscure to many people then) that the good people and the moral actors in the days of American slavery were the runaways who exercised their agency in courageous and surprising acts of self-liberation and the abolitionists who joined the cause. When the system of slavery was legally abolished, a new moral norm was established, and everyone, acting normally, was freed to discover the better angels of themselves.
What if we took another leap forward, and agreed that predation and exploitation were unacceptable? What if the vast majority of people mobilized to abolish the system of private profit and wage slavery altogether? What if the horizon of our moral universe stretched that far? What could we imagine then, and what might we build together?
Human beings are driven by a long and continuous “I don’t know, and I’d like to find out.” It’s not the known that propels us out of bed and out the door, it’s not the status quo that prods us up the next hill or onto the next challenge, nor is it “received wisdom” that pushes and pulls us along. Rather, the deep motivation at the core of our humanity, the powerful force pushing toward enlightenment and liberation, is the hope that we will once again create and invent, plant and build, challenge and overcome.
This is a call to resist the insistent pull of tradition or dogma, the easy acquiescence to the orthodox opinion of the moment. It’s an argument against the cynical shrug that says, “That’s just the way things are,” and the world-weary sigh that implies that nothing can be done. This is a manifesto against passivity and defeat, and in favor of action as an antidote to despair. This is an invitation to gather together in an expanding public square, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, in order to fight for something radically different and dramatically better.
History has surprised us before, and history can surely surprise us again.
What if?