You Can Only Watch

Overcoming the despair

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There has been nothing in my lifetime that has made me feel more impotent than the last 22 months. Witnessing the mother of all crimes be livestreamed while its happening to the people of Gaza, and despite protests, direct action, vote leveraging, despite massive disapproval of the population, despite it all, being utterly powerless to effect any change whatsoever to the situation on the ground, has been nothing short of blackpilling. Our goal as communists is to try to maintain a revolutionary optimism, to always believe that history can be changed in the direction of progress, and to believe that we can win, but that is at this moment a leviathan task. In fact, there are so many times where I wish I was as naive and hopeful as I was in 2020, when I believed that the left could win, when I believed that the government could be forced to listen to us, even when I believed that electoral victories were possible and desirable. I sometimes look back on that with as sort of nostalgia for the presence of a hope that I no longer feel. I often write about maintaining our revolutionary optimism and how we can win, but it’s simply untrue that it feels possible all of the time to me. Since around 2022, it’s become increasingly obvious that even getting nominal improvements to our political situation through the existing structures is delusion. The hope of even a modest social democracy (which is, to be clear, not remotely sufficient) has been erased entirely. To really drive the point home, the last 22 months have made it clear that you cannot protest, petition, vote, even individually assassinate your way out of this. You can’t affect change. You can’t stop the bombs. You can’t do much of anything. You can only watch. As many trolley problems as the libs cook up to try to pretend voting for the lesser genocidaire is a valid choice, the fact remains that we have an existing government who does not care one bit for what we want, does not reflect the will of the people, and does not work for us.

When polled, people in western aligned countries report being “dissatisfied with democracy” according to a poll from Pew research, however what these polls truly reflect, if one looks a bit deeper, is not so much that people do not believe in democracy, it is that what is being sold to them as democracy is not democracy at all, and they know it. The undeniable fact that material conditions have continued to erode, that despite what you want there is no one you can elect that will provide it, that public opinion has virtually no impact on policy, is deeply felt by people even if they don’t have the exact words to express it. It isn’t a mystery why more people sit out presidential elections in the U.S. than vote for either party. It’s even less of a surprise that people chose the “burn it all down” guy over the “keep the unacceptable status quo in place” party this time around. We have a population that is desperate to be heard, desperate to be reflected in governance, and is shut out of the process entirely. There is only so much bullshit you can feed a population that is incongruent with the realities of their daily lives before people start to tune you out.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

When you tell people who need prices to go down and wages to go up, that “erm actually wages are rising and inflation isn’t real”, you lose them. Probably forever. When you tell people their suffering isn’t real, tell them that opposing the killing of the mangled and mutilated children they see on their timeline is some sort of bigotry, tell them that the demented old man on the television has a god-ordained right to run for president again without popular input, they give up. They give up on you, on this society, on participation, on even listening to your bullshit ever again. That is where we find ourselves right now. With a population crying out to be heard, and a government that has plugged its ears.

There are of course some who still hold onto hope that this system can magically be reformed, that we can elect enough social democrats to save it, that we can somehow overcome a constitution that was designed to thwart true democracy, that we can put enough left-wing politicians in places of power to make people’s lives better, but I would submit that they are in denial. They are refusing to contend with the ugly reality that only an overthrowing of this system and the building of a new one can deliver us to true freedom from these horrors. I think that for many this is not so much a belief built on an honest appraisal of the situation but on not wanting to find themselves in the same place I do - knowing that the gargantuan task of revolution is the only way and that there is no hope of changing anything through the channels that currently exist. I won’t lie, it’s a scary place to be. We have historically low labor union membership, virtually no class consciousness, a massive encroaching fascist threat that is manifesting itself everywhere, a newly expanded gestapo, and a politically disinterested “opposition party” that is happier to let everything fall into the hands of tyrants than to give an inch to the left. Our position is by no means an enviable one. But it is the reality. And while it may seem that many are sleepwalking their way through it, there are signs that even the less politically conscious of us are aware. This is reflected in so many ways: from the reactions to the assassination of a health insurance CEO, to the tens of thousands going to anti-oligarchy rallies across the country, to even the fact that running a milquetoast status-quo candidate against Trump yielded the worst election loss by Democrats in decades. There is an implicitly-felt notion by the masses that things are not okay and that business-as-usual politics will not fix it.

There is also a pervasive sense of hopelessness among the left that manifests itself in the narcissism of small differences. The constant internecine fights and back biting towards each other over the slight deviations in ideology because it’s easier to wage war against someone close to you politically than to take on the state in all of its tentacular influence and dismantle it. We know that the task before us is one that feels overwhelming in its size, its scope, its urgency. This system is so totalizing that the hope for a future that moves beyond it feels nearly delusional. It is, of course, “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Sometimes it can feel alluring to embrace nihilism and accept our fate. So the question becomes how to overcome this when we know what we are up against. How to return to revolutionary optimism and away from embracing defeat.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he thinks is crucial for a revolutionary to succeed:

“I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love. For me, the revolution, which is not possible without a theory of revolution—and therefore science—is not irreconcilable with love. On the contrary: the revolution is made by people to achieve their humanization. What, indeed, is the deeper motive which moves individuals to become revolutionaries, but the dehumanization of people? The distortion imposed on the word "love" by the capitalist world cannot prevent the revolution from being essentially loving in character, nor can it prevent the revolutionaries from affirming their love of life.” - Pedagogy of the Oppressed,

Much of my work focuses on how our personal, inner state relates to our material conditions. I focus on this because I truly believe that any revolutionary mindset must be infused with a feeling of love for humanity; from a desire to break free from our bondage and to free others. There is no more loving act than that of revolution. While it is much, much easier in our current reality to be consumed with anger, with hate, with a desire for revenge, that is not what these movements are built on. You can hate the injustice, you can be furious about it, but unless you are guided by a feeling of love for humanity, you will only be devoured by your own negative emotions. I think what is required of us, first and foremost, is to reaffirm our commitment to each other in love. After all, our love of humanity and the world is the primary difference between us and the barbarians.

While we all are subjected to the inescapable daily horrors of our current reality, we must take a step back amidst those feelings of hopelessness to see if we are becoming enveloped by rage and losing our sense of the bigger picture, of the reason we got into this in the first place. Instead of directing our anger at our comrades, or at the backwards masses, we must be guided by our audacious vision for a more loving world. We must continually see ourselves as part of the masses, and see them as our sisters and brothers in humanity. We must want the best for the least of us, and strive to inject that into our movements. Again and again, we must endeavor to not let the world make us hard, for that would be a victory for our oppressors. The more we can connect and reconnect with our love for the world and for each other, the more we can build our optimism that our victory is inevitable and that the movement we are creating is the one that can save us. We must return over and over to our faith in mankind and in ourselves. It is the only way.

If our movements become centered in love, in good faith and trust in one another, we become something that is gravitational. We are able to bring those who have lost all hope in and transform them, and ourselves in the process. When so much of what exists is false, authenticity is a powerful weapon we can wield that the state never could. So if you feel lost, hopeless, depressed, angry and afraid, I implore you to return - again and again - to the feeling of love that exists within you that brought you here in the first place. It is only through this that we can remake the world.

“We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.” - Che Guevara, Writings on Politics & Revolution

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