What Are You Building? With Who?
I want to remind us all of the power and responsibility we have as individuals and that we should not let fear or the feeling of defeat lead us towards nihilism and inaction. A lot of us have a lot more work to do before we truly feel despair.
Can we agree on these things:
1) Every day the world is being made. Laws are made. Laws are nullified. Businesses open and close. People are born. People die. Each day, the potential for a new world opens up.
2) Society is made by people.
3) Society runs the way it does because people come together and agree to it.
Funnily enough, it was working at Yelp summer 2018 (where I only lasted a month) doing ad sales that helped bring this to life for me. I would cry, to tears, on the MARC train from Baltimore to DC about this job hating how much I felt I was scamming people, barely making the 60 dials a day.
I was so frustrated wondering at what point would there no longer be any businesses to call. My manager, who was actually very sweet and sincere, reminded me that businesses close but also businesses open meaning that each day provides new opportunity for an ad sale. I did not want to hear that bullshit, but it’s true. The world is fluid and the behemoth of the world is full of moving parts. Everything is subject to change.
If we can agree to those things, then what is our individual responsibility to shaping the world? How have our parents shaped the world into a better place for us? Our grandparents? Did they do that? Did they understand the world around them? What didn’t they understand? What don’t we understand and why?
If you read the texts - Blood In My Eye, Revolutionary Suicide, Death of the Liberal Class, amongst many others - you understand that revolutionary people must be builders. Not in the way of constructing a house (though if you can do that by all means please do). But revolutionary people must be architects in how we create and structure institutions.
If you haven’t read these texts, I certainly recommend doing so as they provide a better vision of the world at hand. As we understand the world around us is falling apart and the contradictions of our society cause the unraveling, a new world is being born with or without us. New social orders are being defined. Many of us have abdicated (or given away) our power. Some have traded it for career growth or clout. But what does that then mean for the people coming after us that won’t benefit?
If your friend is still having arguments mad at third party voters, maybe ask if they’ve read Death of the Liberal Class. If you haven’t read it yourself, perhaps pick it up or download it from the Internet Archive. Maybe you can read it together. We each have people who trust us and people who care for our recommendation. The future is worth the nudge. If you imagine all the ways we are socialized to rely on recommendation and belonging via peer pressure and FOMO, imagine what could be done if we jointly participated in things that actually mattered rather than goofy trends to benefit capitalism.
Your friend. Your homie/homegirl. Your frat brothers. Your friendly coworker that you’re not calling a friend just yet. What do they think of the future if AI replaces their jobs. Corporations have already made their intentions clear that they want to replace engineers with AI. What then does that make for our children who’s had coding forced down their throats since The Social Network came out. What’s your value as a human if you have no labor to provide - at least according to the capitalist class? What will you do if there’s no unemployment and social services are gutted? Will you starve? Will you steal? Where will you sleep? What if you get crushed by a bulldozer like the tragic gentleman in Atlanta? Who can you call on?
No one is apolitical in the apocalypse. Don’t wait for the world to end before you decide to draw the line and stop the world from ending. We shouldn’t wait for the world to completely end before getting into action and using our own spheres of influence to build community and make comrades. We don’t have to wait for the world to end before we examine our values and work with others to create the society we wish to see.
The fact of the matter is - we need more comrades. And active ones. We need more comrades in the classroom especially. But also at the Amazon warehouse. We need more comrades working at Apple Retail. We need more comrades in the restaurant doing bar service. We need more comrades in the daycare center. We need comrades in construction - ones doing project management and doing manual labor. We need more comrades building PR decks in the day while doing mutual aid work in the night. We need more comrades making songs about shaking ass while leading a radical book club for high schoolers. We need comrades at FootLocker selling sneakers after school and reading Death of the Liberal Class on the weekend so they won’t vote for Zionists when they’re eligible to vote. We need more comrades booing governors and mayors that they feel comfortable cozying up to Zionists. We need more comrades in the juries of courts, both real and of public opinion. We need more comrades to disrupt arms shipments. We need more comrades to disavow their cousins joining the police force to arrest those who disrupt arms shipments.
We need more comrades to understand urban planning and the importance of density and bike lanes.We need more comrades to take the 12 minutes to be at the polls and vote for fellow comrades who represent our values - even if we feel electoral politics is trash and reactionary. We still need you. All of you.
What can you assist with building? What can you help sustain? What protests are you showing up for? How can I show up for you? What ingredients you need from the store? What books are you reading? Can we read together? When you donate $5 to the Baltimore Beat, can you get a friend to do so as well? Can we build a new society together? Can you bring a friend?