Every convenience I enjoy in life has been made possible by the immiseration of others. The oranges on the table, the winter coat I wear as I rush down the steps of my apartment building to the subway—all of it would not exist if someone elsewhere hadn’t toiled in an orchard, a factory, in the subterranean caverns of my city, hadn’t driven a van up and down the streets. In the subway I watch as a woman, most likely from a Central American country in which the United States has meddled, with a baby strapped to her back, paces up and down the car, offering passengers sticks of gum and shiny packets of candy for a dollar, only to be turned away or ignored. A single dollar: that is what another man in visibly soiled clothes asks for as he trudges down the car. A food-delivery guy is dozing off. Unlike some of his other compatriots on the train, he is granted the putative dignity of being a much-celebrated “independent contractor,” such that his partner in business, a major American corporation, can avoid paying for benefits. Another woman hurries away into the next compartment after the homeless man begins to scream, Please, can somebody help me?
Everyone in this train car is free to live their lives however they wish, free to sell their labor to the highest bidder, so long as they meet the requirements, which may or may not have anything to do with their innate capacities. There is more social cooperation to be had between venture capitalists—who are happy to pool together a pile of money to invent new ways to gamble, new things to gamble on—than there is in this train car.
What a sorry state of affairs! Our lives are sustained by varying degrees of moral compromise and self-deception, and this is not our fault. Extend the line of this argument a little further, and it is difficult to see if there is any objective basis for morality whatsoever. Concepts like justice or desert or the good life index the gap between what is and what ought to be, and if our world increasingly collapses the distinction, these concepts don’t just lose their solidity; ethics itself becomes a matter of persuasion or appeals to sentiment. Morality would then be a matter of providing a definitive hierarchy of suffering or counting utils. Our image of the human continues to be that of Homo economicus, mollified by concessions, abundance, fully automated luxury communism; the sociality fostered by default is acquisitiveness modulated by largesse. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: a nugget of nihilism passed through generations since 1848.
Despair narrows your field of vision. In this city, as in others, you learn to anesthetize the heart in order to live: we are stuck in the same train car for however long our commutes are, that’s all. And so, instead of considering the lives of these strangers on the subway, you turn inward, you must tend to your garden, you must guard your piddling fiefdom. You might yet wince at the idea of subjugating others, preferring a life punctuated by the consumption of goods and services. We are willing to suffer so many varieties of moral injury to preserve a shot at that white picket fence. Unmoored from any sense of place or time, all you have is yourself, your family and whatever assortment of friends and lovers you accumulate over the years, berthed to their dreams and your minor ambitions, bobbling along unto death. All you can ask for is the right to be left alone.
●
In the depths of our alienation, ethical intuition gets severed from action. This problem preoccupied the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre for the better part of his career. When tanks rolled down the boulevards of Budapest to crush the student uprising in 1956, MacIntyre, then an avowed Marxist and partisan in the pages of Labour Review, sought to find the resources to understand these abuses as moral failures from within communism, without falling back on liberal individualism. By the time his magisterial After Virtue (1981) was published, MacIntyre had become disillusioned with socialism, but saw this tragedy on the left as a more generalized crisis of ethical understanding: if “Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition,” he wrote, “this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.” The same Enlightenment tradition that had produced the universalist subject of history (and therefore a Marx or a Trotsky) and the social contract had also eroded the concept of communal obligation—and with it, the foundations of intersubjective ethical understanding. The grounds for an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, he observed, remained curiously resonant with the ideal of the association of free producers that animated even the most ardent defenders of capitalism. Anyone interested in emancipation, in other words, inadvertently affirmed the vision of solitary Übermenschen instantiating their desires. Every man would in fact be an island. When MacIntyre says in the very last lines of After Virtue that we are not waiting for a Godot but a St. Benedict, he is conceding this: the best one can hope for now is for meager parcels of virtue and human kindness, made possible by a retreat from the rest of the world as it collapses.
The triumphant barbarians he condemned in the infamous last passages of the book were not the communists, after all. When MacIntyre first made his quip about the barbarians and St. Benedict in a 1979 London Review of Books article, he was quite clear about the object of his ire: “capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order.” Margaret Thatcher had already been prime minister of his native Scotland for two years by the time After Virtue was published; Ronald Reagan came into power in his adopted country that same year. So complete and total was the victory of what we now call neoliberal austerity that MacIntyre didn’t bother to offer an account of how and why people come to dominate others in his book. It was a matter of fact that all institutions inculcated a lust for power. While “proletarianization makes it necessary for workers to resist,” he would later write, “it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.” And so MacIntyre would turn, in the remaining years of his life, to the study of natural theology and individual moral exemplars. He was interested in people who found themselves in opposition to capitalist markets—farming cooperatives, fishing crews, favelas—and how they managed to resuscitate the notion of human flourishing through already existing forms of self-directed communal enterprise. MacIntyre thought that integrated social practices like these, where people come together and work toward mutually agreed-upon ends, were the only way ethical action could still be coherent as a concept.
It’s not entirely surprising that so many socialists of MacIntyre’s generation, himself included, turned to theology. The old bet that we could end all relations of domination, to do away with class hierarchy wholesale, seemed increasingly unlikely, especially as the Soviet Union fell and China’s state capitalist regime proved quite stable. In religion the disillusioned were able to recuperate the normative register of hope that seems to be denied to anyone clear-eyed about the brutality that sustains human life in our moment. Emancipation becomes a matter of faith, capitalism our original sin and Marxism a kind of idolatry—where true believers are condemned to spend their days dusting portraits of dead socialists, waiting for the Messiah (the awakened working class) to enter the frame.
You might wonder how this is relevant to the fact of my five-dollar oranges, or the strangers I’m sitting across from on the subway. I would like to suggest that there is a kind of misapprehension in moving from well-founded despair to a sense of futility about the emancipatory project writ large, the same sort of misapprehension that MacIntyre was led to address in his committed communist youth:
To discover what we share with others, to rediscover common desire, is to acquire a new moral standpoint. One cannot, of course, make this discovery by introspection whether systematic or random. Whether one makes it at all will depend on whether capitalism places men in a position in which so deep dissatisfaction is born that only a realistic answer to the question ‘What do I really want?’ can be given. The history of all false consciousness is a history of evasions of this question. And this question can only be answered by a discovery that ‘I want’ and ‘we want’ coincide; I discover both what I want and how to achieve it, as I discover with whom I share my wants, as I discover, that is, the class to whom I am bound.
Rediscovering common desire is not a matter of willing ourselves to believe that a kinder world is possible, nor simply a matter of adopting the correct analytical stance. As the younger MacIntyre points out, it requires that we become conscious of the position we occupy along different striations of power, the interest group to which we belong; we would, in this process, come to understand that how I should live my life is intrinsically tied to other questions, such as how others ought to live theirs, and what forms of social organization would be necessary for you and me to live such lives. Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, as the oft-quoted line goes, but the point is to change it; MacIntyre was right to turn his attention to social practice. But his disappointment with socialism was so profound that he lost sight of how discovering class consciousness is itself a social practice, where people form communities through a constant feedback loop of desire, self-inquiry and action. The Greeks had a word for this. They used to call it politics.
●
When I was seven, the legislature in Hong Kong, where I grew up, tried to pass a bill that could criminalize dissent against the governments in Hong Kong and mainland China and treat criticism as a kind of treason. My parents both understood that the proposed law was a threat to their freedom of speech, but their opposition was grounded in the vague sense that this would make it even harder for people like them to advocate for their interests, economic and otherwise. They made it clear that our family’s participation in this protest had something to do with what had happened in the streets of Beijing in 1989, inadvertently inaugurating us into a counter-tradition of resistance, of political action as an ethical imperative. Neither of them believed they could stop the bill from being passed. It was understood that the legislature, a majority of which was not democratically elected, would rubber-stamp it. But, as my mother would tell us again and again, it was imperative that they make clear this was not their choice.
The adults’ reigning assumption was that their children would in fact grow into adults, capable of reflecting on the values with which they were inculcated when they were young, and it was imperative for them, at least in this one setting, to introduce a sense of personal responsibility for the community in which they lived. Their children might be too young to understand, but even they, the little ones, will have done something correctly—they will have been part of the struggle, even if history will not vindicate any of us. In that regard, attending the protest could never be a futile gesture.
From the soccer fields in Victoria Park, we walked in a mass procession down the streets of Causeway Bay and Wanchai all the way into Central, where the government’s offices were. The whole route was a little under three miles. At some point, we were kettled into a side street, right by a café whose Belgian waffles I would pine for every time my father and I walked past on our way to ballet class. This time, like many other times, I looked in through the window, and found myself looking at a girl around my age. She was sitting there with her parents, prodding at her meal. We locked eyes, and I saw, reflected in the glass, all these aunties and uncles I didn’t know, toddlers in strollers, my mom and dad, me. I was suddenly grateful to be outside in the sweltering heat. I remember thinking: It is so much better to be out here than it is to be inside, watching the world pass by. I understood, for the briefest of moments, the full measure of what it means to act with and for one another. And then we continued to move.
Common interest can only be found through self-conscious, concerted action with and for one another. In this way, collective projects of emancipation, regardless of the forms they take—mutual-aid networks, mass movements, organized labor, immigrant-defense coalitions—are integrated social practices, the foundations upon which a good life can be built. Solidarity—a sense of duty to a community, politicized at the moment of its emergence—is remarkably concrete. For a brief second, you understand yourself and those around you as belonging to a collectivity not yet realized; the particular is sublated into the universal and, in relation to others, you allow yourself to be changed. Love might be a better analogy than faith. Perhaps that is why even the curmudgeonly Theodor Adorno constantly revisited Romeo and Juliet in his work—the strength of their mutual affection demands that a world that would condemn their partnership must not stand.
We won, by the way, at least in the short term. A handful of legislators and ministers, perturbed by the show of public resistance, resigned; the 2003 bill did not pass. That win buoyed so many subsequent social movements—from 2008 to 2010 to 2012 to 2014 to 2019—and with each minor success and major setback, people in the city developed a more sophisticated understanding of why things are the way that they are, and how they might act differently in the next instance. You can see this from how quickly Hong Kongers organized themselves to pool together resources in the wake of the recent Tai Po estate fire, handing out coats and food and accounting for households in a big crowdsourced spreadsheet, and how quickly the government threatens repression whenever a public tragedy occurs. Every act of mutual aid or kindness becomes, in this environment, very clearly political, and every Hong Konger, even in their presumed quiescence, sees in every breach another opening.
●
These people on the subway are strangers to me, despite my best intentions. Once, when I still had a cushy office job, I gave a five-dollar bill to a visually impaired man making his usual rounds on the 4 train, and a woman spent the next several minutes railing against the man’s impertinence. How dare he ask for more? You cannot help people who won’t help themselves, she said. I did not know how to respond to her then. The register of insurrection, of profound social transformation, feels out of reach. We want to call for a world without brutality, yet domination and degradation condition so much of what we know. Even now, as I write this, an essay I promised would be a manifesto of sorts, I hear all these words put to paper as a meek plea, proverbial hat in hand: Well, what about kindness? The subtext floats to the surface: you are a sucker; you are getting played. That man on the train kept occupying the same stairwell in the station, until one day he was surrounded by a small contingent of cops, and I never saw him again.
Here in the United States, anyone born in the 1990s or thereafter has only ever been conscious of a time when waves of mass mobilization have been met with state repression or indifference; every action produces a counterreaction. People marched for a kid named Trayvon, and a decade later a man named Jordan, who would have overlapped with him in high school, perished in his own shit on the subway. Public backlash against sexual violence spluttered and grew silent after Roe v. Wade was overturned. As I write, the United States has abducted the Venezuelan head of state, seemingly for oil, and even if the government doesn’t annex Greenland or intervene in Iran, it will continue justifying approaching immigration enforcement as a matter of national security, and everyone, even those with the appropriate papers, will get swept into this vortex of ever-increasing violence. An American citizen has just been executed while driving away from an ICE agent. The dead pile on top of the dead.
No one wants to live in this society. But we cannot leave. Even St. Benedict had to exit his cave at some point and rejoin the living. And so we gather our strength and attempt to breathe life into that grand old hypothesis once more: there is a better form of social organization, in which each person will want to, and actually can, contribute to the collective project of living.
●
Everything bears witness to the buried life, to paraphrase a great socialist poet. If your job grants you meaning, it is because there is dignity in human endeavor, in mutual cooperation; if it feels obscene to watch masked paramilitary forces dragging people out of cars and apartments, if you are capable of recognizing atrocities for what they are, it is because no amount of degradation has been able to whittle away those seeds of longing for a world without brutality. Despair is unintelligible without a conception of the good.
There are very few practices in contemporary life in which we get the strange sense that a particular context built and shared with others, in pursuit of human freedom, instantiates the genuinely universal. It stands to reason that this is not knowledge or a viewpoint that can be acquired by yourself alone. You must join the throng: to learn, in the daily practice of living, how your desire articulates that of the common good of the main.
The truly radical component of the gambit here, contra technocrats and those who loathe the rabble, is that everyone, even the poorest, most deprived wretch, is not only capable of doing this, but that all of us working in tandem can realize those debased ideals of revolutions past: democratic self-governance; conscious, self-directed human activity; a genuine belief in our common humanity; an end to all social hierarchies. If this essay can convince you of anything, it is that none of us can go it alone. And none of us have to. As a volunteer helping families at an ICE facility told me, in one of those commonplaces that nevertheless holds an ancient political wisdom, each of us has a role to play.
The work toward socialism is a kind of public teaching laboratory, to paraphrase another revolutionary—a process through which humanity finally remakes itself in its own image. Through the process of collective action, we are no longer unmoored; we understand ourselves as having a place in history. In struggle we rediscover the good life, a life where thought and deed and will are united in one.
Art credit: Gwen Yip, Busy Minds in Silence, 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 24 × 30 in. Courtesy of the artist
Every convenience I enjoy in life has been made possible by the immiseration of others. The oranges on the table, the winter coat I wear as I rush down the steps of my apartment building to the subway—all of it would not exist if someone elsewhere hadn’t toiled in an orchard, a factory, in the subterranean caverns of my city, hadn’t driven a van up and down the streets. In the subway I watch as a woman, most likely from a Central American country in which the United States has meddled, with a baby strapped to her back, paces up and down the car, offering passengers sticks of gum and shiny packets of candy for a dollar, only to be turned away or ignored. A single dollar: that is what another man in visibly soiled clothes asks for as he trudges down the car. A food-delivery guy is dozing off. Unlike some of his other compatriots on the train, he is granted the putative dignity of being a much-celebrated “independent contractor,” such that his partner in business, a major American corporation, can avoid paying for benefits. Another woman hurries away into the next compartment after the homeless man begins to scream, Please, can somebody help me?
Everyone in this train car is free to live their lives however they wish, free to sell their labor to the highest bidder, so long as they meet the requirements, which may or may not have anything to do with their innate capacities. There is more social cooperation to be had between venture capitalists—who are happy to pool together a pile of money to invent new ways to gamble, new things to gamble on—than there is in this train car.
What a sorry state of affairs! Our lives are sustained by varying degrees of moral compromise and self-deception, and this is not our fault. Extend the line of this argument a little further, and it is difficult to see if there is any objective basis for morality whatsoever. Concepts like justice or desert or the good life index the gap between what is and what ought to be, and if our world increasingly collapses the distinction, these concepts don’t just lose their solidity; ethics itself becomes a matter of persuasion or appeals to sentiment. Morality would then be a matter of providing a definitive hierarchy of suffering or counting utils. Our image of the human continues to be that of Homo economicus, mollified by concessions, abundance, fully automated luxury communism; the sociality fostered by default is acquisitiveness modulated by largesse. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: a nugget of nihilism passed through generations since 1848.
Despair narrows your field of vision. In this city, as in others, you learn to anesthetize the heart in order to live: we are stuck in the same train car for however long our commutes are, that’s all. And so, instead of considering the lives of these strangers on the subway, you turn inward, you must tend to your garden, you must guard your piddling fiefdom. You might yet wince at the idea of subjugating others, preferring a life punctuated by the consumption of goods and services. We are willing to suffer so many varieties of moral injury to preserve a shot at that white picket fence. Unmoored from any sense of place or time, all you have is yourself, your family and whatever assortment of friends and lovers you accumulate over the years, berthed to their dreams and your minor ambitions, bobbling along unto death. All you can ask for is the right to be left alone.
●
In the depths of our alienation, ethical intuition gets severed from action. This problem preoccupied the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre for the better part of his career. When tanks rolled down the boulevards of Budapest to crush the student uprising in 1956, MacIntyre, then an avowed Marxist and partisan in the pages of Labour Review, sought to find the resources to understand these abuses as moral failures from within communism, without falling back on liberal individualism. By the time his magisterial After Virtue (1981) was published, MacIntyre had become disillusioned with socialism, but saw this tragedy on the left as a more generalized crisis of ethical understanding: if “Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition,” he wrote, “this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.” The same Enlightenment tradition that had produced the universalist subject of history (and therefore a Marx or a Trotsky) and the social contract had also eroded the concept of communal obligation—and with it, the foundations of intersubjective ethical understanding. The grounds for an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, he observed, remained curiously resonant with the ideal of the association of free producers that animated even the most ardent defenders of capitalism. Anyone interested in emancipation, in other words, inadvertently affirmed the vision of solitary Übermenschen instantiating their desires. Every man would in fact be an island. When MacIntyre says in the very last lines of After Virtue that we are not waiting for a Godot but a St. Benedict, he is conceding this: the best one can hope for now is for meager parcels of virtue and human kindness, made possible by a retreat from the rest of the world as it collapses.
The triumphant barbarians he condemned in the infamous last passages of the book were not the communists, after all. When MacIntyre first made his quip about the barbarians and St. Benedict in a 1979 London Review of Books article, he was quite clear about the object of his ire: “capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order.” Margaret Thatcher had already been prime minister of his native Scotland for two years by the time After Virtue was published; Ronald Reagan came into power in his adopted country that same year. So complete and total was the victory of what we now call neoliberal austerity that MacIntyre didn’t bother to offer an account of how and why people come to dominate others in his book. It was a matter of fact that all institutions inculcated a lust for power. While “proletarianization makes it necessary for workers to resist,” he would later write, “it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.” And so MacIntyre would turn, in the remaining years of his life, to the study of natural theology and individual moral exemplars. He was interested in people who found themselves in opposition to capitalist markets—farming cooperatives, fishing crews, favelas—and how they managed to resuscitate the notion of human flourishing through already existing forms of self-directed communal enterprise. MacIntyre thought that integrated social practices like these, where people come together and work toward mutually agreed-upon ends, were the only way ethical action could still be coherent as a concept.
It’s not entirely surprising that so many socialists of MacIntyre’s generation, himself included, turned to theology. The old bet that we could end all relations of domination, to do away with class hierarchy wholesale, seemed increasingly unlikely, especially as the Soviet Union fell and China’s state capitalist regime proved quite stable. In religion the disillusioned were able to recuperate the normative register of hope that seems to be denied to anyone clear-eyed about the brutality that sustains human life in our moment. Emancipation becomes a matter of faith, capitalism our original sin and Marxism a kind of idolatry—where true believers are condemned to spend their days dusting portraits of dead socialists, waiting for the Messiah (the awakened working class) to enter the frame.
You might wonder how this is relevant to the fact of my five-dollar oranges, or the strangers I’m sitting across from on the subway. I would like to suggest that there is a kind of misapprehension in moving from well-founded despair to a sense of futility about the emancipatory project writ large, the same sort of misapprehension that MacIntyre was led to address in his committed communist youth:
Rediscovering common desire is not a matter of willing ourselves to believe that a kinder world is possible, nor simply a matter of adopting the correct analytical stance. As the younger MacIntyre points out, it requires that we become conscious of the position we occupy along different striations of power, the interest group to which we belong; we would, in this process, come to understand that how I should live my life is intrinsically tied to other questions, such as how others ought to live theirs, and what forms of social organization would be necessary for you and me to live such lives. Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, as the oft-quoted line goes, but the point is to change it; MacIntyre was right to turn his attention to social practice. But his disappointment with socialism was so profound that he lost sight of how discovering class consciousness is itself a social practice, where people form communities through a constant feedback loop of desire, self-inquiry and action. The Greeks had a word for this. They used to call it politics.
●
When I was seven, the legislature in Hong Kong, where I grew up, tried to pass a bill that could criminalize dissent against the governments in Hong Kong and mainland China and treat criticism as a kind of treason. My parents both understood that the proposed law was a threat to their freedom of speech, but their opposition was grounded in the vague sense that this would make it even harder for people like them to advocate for their interests, economic and otherwise. They made it clear that our family’s participation in this protest had something to do with what had happened in the streets of Beijing in 1989, inadvertently inaugurating us into a counter-tradition of resistance, of political action as an ethical imperative. Neither of them believed they could stop the bill from being passed. It was understood that the legislature, a majority of which was not democratically elected, would rubber-stamp it. But, as my mother would tell us again and again, it was imperative that they make clear this was not their choice.
The adults’ reigning assumption was that their children would in fact grow into adults, capable of reflecting on the values with which they were inculcated when they were young, and it was imperative for them, at least in this one setting, to introduce a sense of personal responsibility for the community in which they lived. Their children might be too young to understand, but even they, the little ones, will have done something correctly—they will have been part of the struggle, even if history will not vindicate any of us. In that regard, attending the protest could never be a futile gesture.
From the soccer fields in Victoria Park, we walked in a mass procession down the streets of Causeway Bay and Wanchai all the way into Central, where the government’s offices were. The whole route was a little under three miles. At some point, we were kettled into a side street, right by a café whose Belgian waffles I would pine for every time my father and I walked past on our way to ballet class. This time, like many other times, I looked in through the window, and found myself looking at a girl around my age. She was sitting there with her parents, prodding at her meal. We locked eyes, and I saw, reflected in the glass, all these aunties and uncles I didn’t know, toddlers in strollers, my mom and dad, me. I was suddenly grateful to be outside in the sweltering heat. I remember thinking: It is so much better to be out here than it is to be inside, watching the world pass by. I understood, for the briefest of moments, the full measure of what it means to act with and for one another. And then we continued to move.
Common interest can only be found through self-conscious, concerted action with and for one another. In this way, collective projects of emancipation, regardless of the forms they take—mutual-aid networks, mass movements, organized labor, immigrant-defense coalitions—are integrated social practices, the foundations upon which a good life can be built. Solidarity—a sense of duty to a community, politicized at the moment of its emergence—is remarkably concrete. For a brief second, you understand yourself and those around you as belonging to a collectivity not yet realized; the particular is sublated into the universal and, in relation to others, you allow yourself to be changed. Love might be a better analogy than faith. Perhaps that is why even the curmudgeonly Theodor Adorno constantly revisited Romeo and Juliet in his work—the strength of their mutual affection demands that a world that would condemn their partnership must not stand.
We won, by the way, at least in the short term. A handful of legislators and ministers, perturbed by the show of public resistance, resigned; the 2003 bill did not pass. That win buoyed so many subsequent social movements—from 2008 to 2010 to 2012 to 2014 to 2019—and with each minor success and major setback, people in the city developed a more sophisticated understanding of why things are the way that they are, and how they might act differently in the next instance. You can see this from how quickly Hong Kongers organized themselves to pool together resources in the wake of the recent Tai Po estate fire, handing out coats and food and accounting for households in a big crowdsourced spreadsheet, and how quickly the government threatens repression whenever a public tragedy occurs. Every act of mutual aid or kindness becomes, in this environment, very clearly political, and every Hong Konger, even in their presumed quiescence, sees in every breach another opening.
●
These people on the subway are strangers to me, despite my best intentions. Once, when I still had a cushy office job, I gave a five-dollar bill to a visually impaired man making his usual rounds on the 4 train, and a woman spent the next several minutes railing against the man’s impertinence. How dare he ask for more? You cannot help people who won’t help themselves, she said. I did not know how to respond to her then. The register of insurrection, of profound social transformation, feels out of reach. We want to call for a world without brutality, yet domination and degradation condition so much of what we know. Even now, as I write this, an essay I promised would be a manifesto of sorts, I hear all these words put to paper as a meek plea, proverbial hat in hand: Well, what about kindness? The subtext floats to the surface: you are a sucker; you are getting played. That man on the train kept occupying the same stairwell in the station, until one day he was surrounded by a small contingent of cops, and I never saw him again.
Here in the United States, anyone born in the 1990s or thereafter has only ever been conscious of a time when waves of mass mobilization have been met with state repression or indifference; every action produces a counterreaction. People marched for a kid named Trayvon, and a decade later a man named Jordan, who would have overlapped with him in high school, perished in his own shit on the subway. Public backlash against sexual violence spluttered and grew silent after Roe v. Wade was overturned. As I write, the United States has abducted the Venezuelan head of state, seemingly for oil, and even if the government doesn’t annex Greenland or intervene in Iran, it will continue justifying approaching immigration enforcement as a matter of national security, and everyone, even those with the appropriate papers, will get swept into this vortex of ever-increasing violence. An American citizen has just been executed while driving away from an ICE agent. The dead pile on top of the dead.
No one wants to live in this society. But we cannot leave. Even St. Benedict had to exit his cave at some point and rejoin the living. And so we gather our strength and attempt to breathe life into that grand old hypothesis once more: there is a better form of social organization, in which each person will want to, and actually can, contribute to the collective project of living.
●
Everything bears witness to the buried life, to paraphrase a great socialist poet. If your job grants you meaning, it is because there is dignity in human endeavor, in mutual cooperation; if it feels obscene to watch masked paramilitary forces dragging people out of cars and apartments, if you are capable of recognizing atrocities for what they are, it is because no amount of degradation has been able to whittle away those seeds of longing for a world without brutality. Despair is unintelligible without a conception of the good.
There are very few practices in contemporary life in which we get the strange sense that a particular context built and shared with others, in pursuit of human freedom, instantiates the genuinely universal. It stands to reason that this is not knowledge or a viewpoint that can be acquired by yourself alone. You must join the throng: to learn, in the daily practice of living, how your desire articulates that of the common good of the main.
The truly radical component of the gambit here, contra technocrats and those who loathe the rabble, is that everyone, even the poorest, most deprived wretch, is not only capable of doing this, but that all of us working in tandem can realize those debased ideals of revolutions past: democratic self-governance; conscious, self-directed human activity; a genuine belief in our common humanity; an end to all social hierarchies. If this essay can convince you of anything, it is that none of us can go it alone. And none of us have to. As a volunteer helping families at an ICE facility told me, in one of those commonplaces that nevertheless holds an ancient political wisdom, each of us has a role to play.
The work toward socialism is a kind of public teaching laboratory, to paraphrase another revolutionary—a process through which humanity finally remakes itself in its own image. Through the process of collective action, we are no longer unmoored; we understand ourselves as having a place in history. In struggle we rediscover the good life, a life where thought and deed and will are united in one.
Art credit: Gwen Yip, Busy Minds in Silence, 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 24 × 30 in. Courtesy of the artist
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.