Our Messy Struggle Towards Freedom

Michel Foucault: “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.”

This is one of the main tenants in Maggie Nelson’s amazing book On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” [or of course televised]. That’s the title of a book review in the NYT of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman.

Both writers are talking about how historical “acts of freedom” or “radical ideas” have played out so differently depending upon the time and players but that collectively they engage in redefining power instead of “waiting for the ‘big night’ of liberation.” As Nelson quotes anthropologist David Graeber, “Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Nelson’s book tells the stories of those who try to act this way in four arenas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas focuses on the “quiet ones” whose rebellions under the establishment radar often ended in defeat but ultimately moved towards freedom.

Reading Nelson’s book and the review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas made me think about a conversation I’ve had more than once with a fellow player in contemporary radicalism, Ike DeVargas, with whom I’ve worked to empower rural communities in their battles over access to resources, expose corrupt politicians and corporate incompetence, and stop mass incarceration. Whenever I begin to bemoan the losses we’ve witnessed in any number of these battles and threaten to quit, he stops me with, “But you never know what positive effects you’ve had on everyone who’s been working alongside you and what those effects might have that you’ll never even know about.”

Nelson puts it another way, addressing the many more realms she takes on: “Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to “stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!”

There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s pretty damn hard to “act as if one is already free.” I’m also reading The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of American’s Secret Government. While we understandably focus our outrage today on how the “war on terror” unleashed the secret deep state surveillance, this book reminds us how the “fear of Communism” created the king of surveillance, the CIA, that not only used that “intelligence” to initiate coups around the world—Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, etc.—but to stoke the nuclear arms race. And just as it remains today, it was all founded on the corporatization of America to expand our empire, making a mockery of democracy. We’re not going to establish new “power relationships” that lead to liberation by electing a Democrat instead of a Republican to the presidency—or appointing a CIA director who vows there will be no more assassinations. Power brokers like Allen Dulles and Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld’s stink have infected a system that no vaccination can cure.

It’s up to us to figure out, and good luck with that. As Nelson points out: “No doubt there is much to feel powerless about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this fact to a much greater extent than others. But locating authentic radicalism in the purity of powerlessness does not necessarily lead to our empowerment, or to more just, responsible exercises of it. A deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us insensitive to the power that we do have, even as we demand such an accounting from others.” I’m afraid it’s back to Foucault: a constant reassessment of the power that we do have in our struggles towards freedom.