Choose Your Revolution, or "Stop Fighting Against Things"

July 10, 2009 by Nathan Acks

In a recent talk Bruce Sterling proposed that the environmentalists of my generation apply the "Great-Grandfather Principle" to their actions. "Stop acting dead," he said.

Now, you think that acting dead is a virtue because you've been trained to behave as if you were dead for a long time, and it actually appeals to your temperament as a generation. It's your default position. But you have to stop it, because "hair shirt green"... just changes the polarity of the Twentieth Century. It's just the opposite of consumer culture... It's not really a different way to live. And it's not something that's going to fulfill you.

Now, how do you know if you're acting dead? Well, there's a test for this: It's the "great-grandfather principle." You're saying you're "going to do something really morally worthwhile that will make me feel proud of myself," but does your dead great-grandfather do a better job of it than you?

For instance, saving water. Water is indestructible first of all. You cannot possibly damage water... But you're trying to save water, because you're told to save water. Alright. Your dead great-grandfather is saving more water than you. You cannot possibly save any more water than a dead guy. He's greener than you in that regard.

Saving electrical power. Okay, you shouldn't be using power, power's bad, you need a lower [electrical] footprint... Your great-grandfather is not using any electrical power. He's much greener than you. You cannot compete with that.

You should move into a smaller apartment? Your [great]-grandfather's in a very, very small apartment. It's underground, there's no lighting, there's no heating, he doesn't have any broadband.

Recycling? Okay, recycling is useful in some ways. Your [great]-grandfather is literally being recycled. You can't actually out-recycle your dead [great]-grandfather.

And furthermore, in a pretty short amount of time, compared to the lengths of the problems you're tackling, you're going to be dead like your [great]-grandfather. You'll be saving everything at that point. I mean, you might be alive seventy, eighty, ninety years... You're gonna be dead for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years of saving water. Billions of years of having a light carbon footprint.

It's carbon sequestration. You're full of carbon and they buried you.

So you need to do things that you can do while alive.

Sterling is being his usual acerbic self here, but his point remains and, more importantly, is broadly applicable to many causes today's radicals hold dear. Your dead great-grandfather isn't part of an economic system that blows the tops off of mountains. He doesn't go out and bomb villages on the other side of the world. He won't eat animals. There is no way that any of us can be more virtuous in these ways than our dead great-grandfathers.

To our credit I think some of us have started to figure this out. But I'd be a lot happier if the conclusions we were reaching didn't sound like something that might have been uttered in the final moments of Jonestown. I recently found myself making the drive from Greeley to Denver with two local activists, and as the conversation turned towards the long-term survival of humanity it became positively gothic. Neither of my comrades saw any long-term hope for humanity. The future, they mused, would consist of bands of hunter-gatherers, but eventually even these would probably disappear. In their minds human intelligence was a failed experiment, and evolution would eventually select against it.

It wasn't so much the bleak the future they presented that shocked me, but rather the fact that they seemed to welcome it. Sure, things were going to get bad, they reckoned, but in the Earth would survive without us. It would even be a better place.

Let me tell you another story.

Back in April a few anti-authoritarian activists I greatly respect visited one of the many "tea parties" being held around the United States. Some of the people they met were the kind of crazies you'd expect at an event promoted by Fox News, but there were also many more ordinary folk, angry with what they described (but did not name) as the class warfare being waged against them. The rage was populist, and while the conservative frame dominated it was not entrenched. There was still room for other, explicitly anti-authoritarian, narratives.

The activists shared their experiences on a mailing list I subscribe to, prompting a fierce debate. "Personally, I'm close to having given up on the American middle class," another activist I respect wrote. He then continued more darkly that "[u]sing them as pawns on the other hand... makes more sense." Later he offered an analysis similar to that found in RAIM-Denver's recent story here on Colorado Indymedia. RAIM-Denver writes that

[u]nlike [Robert] Jensen [a professor of journalism at the University of Texas in Austin], we at RAIM [the Radical Anti-Imperialist Movement] apply global class analysis fully. Doing simple math, Amerika [sic] is only 5 percent of the world population but the consumer of over 25 percent of the world’s resources. The poorest half of the world lives on less than $2 a day, and the bottom 1.3 billion live on less than $1 a day. Although Jensen admits this, RAIM-Denver plainly says the obvious truth and takes it to its logical end: Amerikans [sic] are part of the problem; they are a force which must be overcome during the course of progressive change. Unlike Jensen who is fruitlessly engaged in various forms of pandering to a population of petty exploiters and polluters, RAIM champions the cause of the world’s exploited and oppressed majority as the most direct route to creating a new world.

At one point, Jensen said that he struggles to identify as part of humanity and not Amerikan [sic], white or male. In reality, to stand with humanity is to stand against Amerika [sic] and the First World.

While I'm sure this position feels virtuous, it doesn't offer any real insight — like Sterling's "hair shirt green," it simply changes the polarity of the Twentieth Century. The autocrats of the past argued that there was something special about Western civilization, and that it was "the white man's burden" to spread it. Today it seems that the radical left are still arguing that there's something special about Western civilization, only now it's something "bad" that has become "the white man's burden" to crush (or at least get out of the way so that everyone who's not a white man can do the job for them). Some take it a step further and argue that civilization itself should be annihilated. And a few, like the activists I carpooled home with from Greeley, even seem to welcome our eradication as a species. It's as if our discourse has been reduced to borrowing the dominant memes of the last century and prefixing them with a logical "not."

"[T]o stand with humanity is to stand against Amerika [sic] and the First World." Let's think this through. Are we standing against the first world because the developing world exhibits less racism and overt oppression? Tell that to the Uighurs. Perhaps we believe that developing nations are more economically and politically stable? I doubt the people of Zimbabwe would agree. People the world over have been finding brutal ways to kill and oppress each other since the dawn of recorded history. Probably longer.

Murder, war, rape, slavery, and economic exploitation are hardly unique characteristics of the current dominion held by the first world. This is not to absolve the United States, Europe, or Japan of their past and present crimes. Nor is it an argument that oppression is such a deep part of the human condition as to be impossible to address. If RAIM-Denver had written that to "stand with humanity is to stand against oppression" I would agree, though such a statement still runs afoul of Sterling's "Great-Grandfather Principle." Dead people oppress no one.

Moreover, the problem is not one of simple wealth redistribution. The world's per-capita GDP (adjusted to reflect relative purchasing power) is about $10,400/year. Now, that may sound like a lot (especially if you make less than a dollar a day!), but the important part to note here is that this figure already contains adjustments to account for differing costs of living. Ask someone you know who's ever lived on anything close to this figure how pleasant an experience that kind of poverty is. (By way of comparison, the unit of measure here is equivalent to the 2000 US dollar, and the estimated poverty line for an individual that year was $8,794.) Distributing resources more equally may make life much better for most folks, but it will also make life much worse for many, and unfortunately those on the losing side have the guns, the technology, and the resources. Anyone who for a moment believes that ethical niceties are going to stand in the way of perceived survival when the revolution (or collapse) comes needs to seriously brush up on their history.

Anarchist fantasies about mounting the barricades in some global Twenty-first Century version of the French Revolution are just that — fantasies. Right now there are too few of us, and let's be honest, our position isn't particularly well-placed within the current economic or political system. Why should someone risk persecution so they can join up with a bunch of people offering... Well, what exactly? Certainly not a bigger slice of the resource pie. And if things get messy we won't be offering a longer life expectancy either.

But this discussion also misses the point. The conversation's still as Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and androcentric as it was before — we didn't change our perspectives, we just turned around. We haven't really stepped outside of Western civilization here. Hell, we haven't even really stepped outside of the United States. We talk about the coming revolution as if it were a global event without any discussion of how we expect to achieve this or whether anyone else is even on board with us. Changing things in one country, or one culture, isn't going to change anything. The United States and its allies exit their role as global hegemons stage left. Enter China (or India, or Brazil), stage right. We can all feel good about ourselves then. We did our part. The world might still be going to hell in a hand basket, but at least our consciences are clear.

If you're serious about helping midwife a more just world — or simply ensuring human survival — you need to look straight into this abyss. The world really is flat, just not the way Thomas Friedman thinks it is. A tremendous amount of cultural and technological diffusion has taken place. It is now possible for governments and warlords to monitor dissent more closely than ever before, targeting reprisals more swiftly and accurately or, if need be, killing more people at once than was possible just a hundred years ago. A global uprising of the type still romanticized in radical circles has become so wildly improbable as to be essentially off the table.

So, is that it? Should we all just go home, sit on our hands, and vote for the latest face on TV every four years?

Hardly. If I didn't see myself as a revolutionary I wouldn't be writing this. The difference is in the kind of revolution I believe in. Whether you describe yourself as an anarchist, a communist, a feminist, or an environmentalist, you've cast your lot with a project that you will never live to see completed. The problems we address as radicals are a deep part of the human condition. Overthrowing the hegemony of power, or capital, or patriarchy, or anthropocentrism means rewiring some of our most fundamental social relationships on a scale never before attempted. Like it or not, these institutions give structure to our world and cannot simply be yanked out of our collective psyche. They must be replaced.

The problem isn't the physical manifestation of things. It isn't the SUVs, the computers, or the political parties. It's the social relationships these things embody. The difference between the 2008 protests at the DNC and those at the RNC was that people understood why they should be angry at the Republican Party. But this difference points to a shared failure: The radical community succeeded in attacking the thing (the political system) without damaging the relationship (authoritarian hierarchy). Had the political system experienced a (wildly improbable) collapse due to our efforts, it would not have ushered in an era of anti-authoritarian triumphalism. Smashing the state isn't enough if the relationships the state embodies still dominate our social discourse.

Anyone can set a car on fire. These days the real radicals are starting carshares.

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