By Elias Passas
Early on in the discussion, Esteban Kelly expressed his dissatisfaction with the protest call: a better world is possible. Perhaps due to his personality, he said, he had more of a penchant with actually building things—tethering himself to the real world. Ultimately, he dismissed the call for a new horizon: “Are we content with just the mere suggestion that a better world is possible?” But then it became clear that Kelly had dismissed the call without ever hearing it in the first place. “A better world is possible” is no meager declaration. It challenges the fundamental aspects of the world we are in, and the world we strive for.
Clearly, the world we struggle in now deserves to be challenged by this call. Despite working 50 hours or more a week, you still cannot afford basic necessities? A better world is possible. You suffer the abuse of the police? A better world is possible. You are forced away from love by the barriers of misogyny and heteronormativity? A better world is possible.
But so too do our notions of a new future. You succeeded in unionizing your workplace? A better world is possible. You have built a cooperative industry, which allows its members to live a dignified life? A better world is possible. You love freely, without shame or fear? A better world is possible. Put in this context, the call becomes utopic—unachievable. It unabashedly and ravenously demands for the sublime. I think it prudent to bring above the line a quote that I relegated to a footnote in my ex-ante reflection on the discussion:
The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.[1]
Muñoz calls for a kind of imagining that demands we do not dismiss “a better world is possible” as a meager call.
Kelly’s attitude towards the protest call points to a neoliberal kind of political imagination, seen in his failure to speak on or consider the “cooperative’s” relation to capital or capitalism. Does the cooperative model solve capitalism—making it a kind of entrepreneurial co-conspirator—or is antagonistic to it—a fugitive existing in spite of capitalism’s attempts to totalize? Kelly had no answer. Instead, he said only that member of the cooperative held many ideological perspectives. Thus, cooperatives could coexist with any political economy. In his answer, politics exists as a kind of individual identity or aesthetic marker, like a coat someone dons before setting out for the day.
This essentially neoliberal perspective on politics misses the point. Politics is more than identity;[2] it has a velocity, a creative or destructive energy, and only exists at the level of social relations. Thus, the cooperative—an institution of many social relations, economic and otherwise—has a politics, and a political orientation in its relation with capitalism. Just as with any social relation, it is not neutral to the ordering of social relations in the world more broadly. Perhaps “the cooperative” is too broad a term. There may in fact be “the cooperatives,” each of which has its own political orientation. And in that sense, “the cooperative” could coexist with any political economy—but only because in each political economy, a different “cooperative” does the coexisting.
The question of “the cooperative’s” political orientation is not trivial, because it directly concerns what praxis means. In order to “build the better world”—what Kelly hoped to get to in the first place—we have to know what direction we are building. Otherwise, our actions are not ordered by ourselves and our movement, they are ordered by the political economy which has totalized us.
We see this all too frequently. Just down the street, at the New School, the management (headed by a [the fire next time author] scholar) quoted bell hooks in strikebreaking effort.[3] Left shocked and scratching our heads, we only make sense of it all by understanding that the logic of capitalism has appropriated the legacies of radical thinkers to its own ends. Similarly, we see Basquiat on Coach bags, “liberal” lawyers protecting Nestlé’s use of slave labor, and left leaning intellectuals going to work at an institute which primarily uses its intellectual product to enrich Nike and make the U.S. military more effective. If we decide that what we really desire is a reordering of social relations, the advent of socialism or communism,[4] then we must be engaged with a critique of our own social relation to capitalism. Are we coexisting? Edifying? Fugitive? Adversarial? Taking a position changes the meaning of our work, and changes what we choose.
Sara Horowitz gave a clear answer: mutualism corrects capitalism. Her vision of the world—an essentially Manichaean one—orders productive action as existing primarily in two spheres: governmental and private. For Horowitz, mutualism offers a third way. By building the mutualist sphere, people can collectively repair the worst excesses of capitalism. Investing in, and sustaining, this sphere is the praxis Horowitz engages in.
While I am ultimately left personally unsatisfied with Horowitz’s horizon, her work and her theory of change demands engagement because of how compelling it is as a means to build a better world in the here and now. The mutualist sphere—predominantly, though not exclusively, unions—has made strides against the worst violence of capitalism in degrees that bare legal activism or electoral politics have failed to come close to achieving. Purely materially, non-union workers make only 83%.
But more critically, the union revitalization has breathed new life into resistance to the “bio-political” regime of capitalism, in “production has shifted from the ‘means of life’ to ‘social life itself.’”[5] Mutualist institutions, espousing a radical ethic of love and resistance, have created a window into a horizon of freedom. Pete Seeger’s “Solidarity Forever” has become a song I have heard, with my own ears, on the streets of New York. Starbucks have unionized in a wave, across the country.[6] Pockets of resistance, where people reject the capitalist hellscape handed to them, have sprung up rhizomatically.
We can see this in the emergence of mutualist organizations that step in, in the face of a catastrophically failing state, regardless of whether the law allows. Mutual-aid self defense groups, such as the John Brown Gun Club, stand guard against police sweeps of encampments made by unsheltered people, [7] and defend drag clubs from intimidation when the police fail to do so.[8] This radical mutualism, which takes an anti-statist position on providing basic needs for the community, might be a sort of intrepid first step toward a liberatory future, built on the creed of mutualism, in the face of an ineffectual and dangerous government.
From the discussion, it seemed Sara Horowitz might see danger in such mutualist action—which so intentionally disregards the state for fear of being coopted. She spoke of the importance of government fostering and protecting the mutualist sphere. Eventually, the institutions built by the mutualist sphere may become coopted into the state superstructure, making it more permanent and stable (after all, isn’t that what happened with Social Security?). But after witnessing a historic workers movement in the railroad industry die with the stroke of a pen by legislative action,[9] does a mutualist sphere need a more radical form of self-reliance in order to build a better future, and reconstruct social relations? Wouldn’t it be time for mutualism to take a turn towards self-defense as well?
Notes
[1] José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
[2] Whatever “identity” means.
[3] Nick Pinto, Students Occupy the New School After Administration Cuts Off Pay and Health Coverage for Striking Faculty, Hell Gate (Dec. 8, 2022), https://hellgatenyc.com/students-occupy-the-new-school.
[4] Of course, this is not the path anyone has to choose, but one must choose a direction of some kind.
[5] John Narayan, Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: An Unacknowledged Theory of Empire, 36 Theory, Culture & Society 65 (2017) (quoting Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth Empire (2009), 299).
[6] Map: Where are Starbucks Workers Unionizing, More Perfect Union (Nov. 17, 2022), https://perfectunion.us/map-where-are-starbucks-workers-unionizing/.
[7] Jonathan Richie, Armed Far-Leftists Block Dallas Homeless-Vagrant Camp Clean-up, Dallas Express (Aug. 4, 2022), https://dallasexpress.com/city/armed-far-leftists-block-dallas-homeless-vagrant-camp-clean-up/
[8] Natasha Lennard, Why Queer Communities are Welcoming Armed Antifascist Protection, The Intercept (Nov. 29, 2022), https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/club-q-lgbtq-armed-self-defense/.
[9] David Shepardson & Nandita Bose, Biden Signs Bill to Block U.S. Railroad Strike, Reuters (Dec. 2, 2022), https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/.