‘THE GREAT PAUSE’
A decolonial approach for life beyond neoliberalism
From Cristina Morales
Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
It has already been a while. In the third stage of the pandemic and past the peak of it, new routines and habits have settled in building a new normal. And physical health realm aside, in privileged Western European countries where mostly if you are not somehow ‘supported for now’ in your basic survival you are ‘forgiven for now’ bills wise, some people are considering this limbo as ‘The Great Pause’ — as long as you have enough to eat. A situation far from ideal, but still a pseudo-systemic breather while it lasts for some. A once in a lifetime opportunity to experience what it looks like, and how it feels like, to opt out of the rat race. While knowing that the real pain is waiting, bigger than before, in a gaslighting dress, ahead. A feeling of ephemeral liberation if knowing how to stay in the present and proportional to your degree of internal emancipation from the system.
As philosopher, sociologist and political theorist Herbert Marcuse said fifty years ago in ‘An essay on liberation’: The organised capitalism uses violence on an unprecedented scale in its capacity to produce long-range contentment and satisfaction to reproduce the voluntary servitude. ‘Achievements’ justify the system of domination, and established values become people’s own values where the choice between ‘social necessities’ appears as freedom. Leaving the exploitation hidden in veils, like for example the technological one, and the people amused consuming the industry of entertainment.
While some people have never questioned what he also called that condition an adopted 'second nature’ being completely attached to it, mainly because of how the system alienates us from ourselves in any case, others have managed to have a broader consciousness about themselves and the world we live in with different degrees of identification, assimilation and ‘counter-education’, while living inside the system. They are normally the ones who work, in different ways and under any circumstances, to try to expand it. And probably also the ones who in ‘unemployed’ quarantine have found different degrees of ephemeral ease and an added freeing agency over time — and ultimately life being able to fully give a new focus to it — regardless of their colonially-designed social ‘class’ and especially if they are normally greatly oppressed, when in the previous — liminal — context. Including all those who have not only discovered a new level of awareness through that ‘living in the present’ motto hitting the West as a brand new millennial coping mechanism, but live realising how little is necessary to live — and to live happy — in different settings. And with having no need to adhere to external expectations of any type anymore creating a set of genuine life priorities based on personal values, turned decisions to ‘adapt’ as far as possible to the foreseeable future. And that’s what is unprecedented, society’s ‘permission’ to say no. In Marcuse’s words, the Refusal.
Since we are not quite yet in the ‘return to normal’ but close, and as the final sequel to my second pandemic piece, it is time to ask, where do we go from here now that we have a greater insight? Do we want to rebuild a broken system which is literally killing us on a perpetual pandemic basis? Can we build a new paradigm with what Audre Lorde called the same tools of the old Master’s house? And if not, how do we transcend them?
In this time where we have had the historically unique chance to ask ourselves simultaneously what is truly important to us personally and as a collective, what activities are essential to our social and natural habitat wellbeing, and what it is that we depend on when our lives are — in a clearer manner — under threat, we have proved —with movements like Invisible Hands on a nearly global scale— one thing. We have proved that we can show up in solidarity for each other, self-organising outside institutionalised structures while in the middle of the global disruption of the ecologically and socially abusive, self-interested status quo. Self-interested in an ill manner because when the natural world will sink, no amount of money will save anybody from a self-sabotaged human nature. Mutual Aid are systems that commoners have always stepped up with when the state, market or monarchy fail to provide basic needs in a state of emergency. And that solidarity is not a simple volunteering altruism. The commoning political bases of autonomous solidarity indeed transform our relationship with a failing state, as a decentralised practice of reciprocal care based on communal wellbeing. It is now then time to get fully political, and go from Mutual Aid to Dual Power.
Before the state makes us pay back for its ‘generosity’ in different distorted ways and with different distorted narratives. Before we see ourselves navigating a capitalist economic crisis on top of it to go deeper in our respective designed and imposed oppressed positions. Not even considering what they have been cooking up behind the scenes in their power-grabbing political agendas to exploit us even further. Let’s consider the possibilities crises afford us for the growth of wiser solidarity for each and everyone. Mutual Aid is just the beginning. History is full of community-rooted participatory politics emerging out of a crisis, radical Mutual Aid that links service provisioning with the construction of Dual Power. From the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, to ACT-UP and Occupy Wall Street. Today, various decolonial and abolitionist formations have been established involving Mutual Aid adjusting to the present crisis. They are mobilising these informal networks in more deliberate ways, understanding the legacy of past Mutual Aid which taught us that political self-determination is not possible without economic self-determination. Something that has been well understood by for example the American Woodbine or the British Cooperation Town, claiming spaces for food sovereignty.
While social distancing is a problem for mobilisation, communication is still available and we are not far from the gradual ‘back to normal.’ Dual Power is the process of creating collective counter-power organising society in parallel the status quo. A framework where popular power is built outside the governing institutions of our present system to challenge and displace them through truly democratic ones becoming the new structure of a liberated society. It is a strategy, rather than an ideology, to be used to advance a variety of forms of social change. However, the advantages of the strategy make it most compatible with perspectives that emphasise the exercise of power at the community level, that seek to make the revolutionary movement accountable to the people, that see the capability to revise and transform society as common rather than rare, and that seek decentralised forms of power as the key to personal and social freedom. That is grassroots dual power, the bottom-up transformation and gradual replacement of the mechanisms of society. The horizon extends to autonomous formations capable of challenging the political and economical system that brought us where we are and where we will soon be at, through economic mutualism to start with. We shall not forget we are the engine in the Master’s hierarchical house. With no engine, there is no such house. That is how ‘powerless’ we are. And life will forever be worth fighting for.
Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, argued that intolerable situations such as ours could be cast aside by the public’s revolutionary withdrawal of support from governing institutions where power is understood as the ability to make others do things, often through violence or coercion to enforce control, obedience and domination. These governing institutions are by design colonial since they imply a master/slave hierarchy: the state has power over people, humans have power over nature, men have power over women, rich have power over poor, 'white' people have power over racialised people, and so on. Which is the cause of all of our overlapping and intertwined problems. In her book ‘On Violence’, however, she defines political power as the people’s ability to act in concert — the capacity for collective action, and thus a property of groups, not individuals. Leaders possess their power only because their constituents have empowered them to direct the group’s collective action since all individual power emerges from collective support. When people begin to peaceably withdraw their support and refuse to obey, a government may turn to violence, but its control lasts only as long as the army or police choose to obey as well. And for that withdrawal of obedience to happen we need viable alternatives.
Symbiosis is a continental confederation of grassroots institutions and movements building Dual Power towards a directly democratic and ecological society from the ground up. Symbiosis founding community organisers John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie Horvath, Dayton Martindale, and Matthew Porges state that in the early stages, crafting an alternative political infrastructure is local, but community organisations are designed to be organised as a network. And that by working together and mutually reinforcing one another, these institutions can qualitatively change the power relations of a city or neighbourhood and lay the groundwork for new macrostructures of self-governance and civil society. Also that through engineering new institutions of their own, communities can cultivate a creative and communal spirit that will empower them to take control of their lives, connect to one another across cultural and geographic distances, and gradually develop the egalitarian foundations of a new society.
Movements would assemble direct-democratic and socialistic institutions in civil society; coordinate these through a system of decentralised and confederated democratic assemblies, such as neighbourhood councils, with a dual power relationship to existing state structures; transform systems of local governance to place these popular confederations in control of the public sphere to encourage the further development of the socialist civil society that made such reform possible in the first place; and further confederate these municipal democracies to create first regional and then eventually global decision-making bodies rooted in bottom-up democracy capable of addressing problems such as globalisation and the ecological crisis, transitioning us into a libertarian ecosocialist society.
— John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie Horvath, Dayton Martindale, and Matthew Porges in “Community, democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and beyond”
In any case, in an easier and more aligned way than ever, after having experienced a global collapse, the choice is between totalitarian abuse and citizen empowerment. Between a life in common in ecosocial terms and neoliberal fantasies of unlimited growth and tightly integrated global markets enslaving and dividing us by different layers of oppression and privilege so we don’t dare to come together while our natural home’s life — and ours — are on a countdown. Between life-affirming and death-affirming organisations. Between breakdown and breakthrough. So now commoners come together with allied movements and disillusioned people of goodwill from different political views realising it is a systemic problem. And that there are bigger life-threatening problems than self-determination to be fearful of. What before sounded crazy (because of fake bad press) and unattainable, reaching a deadline sounds common-sensical and compelling.
When people now see tangible victories thanks to Mutual Aid in response to the struggles we face under capitalism, they in turn get more involved believing in radical change and in a transformative political movement which provides immediate support in the face of rampant landlordism, gentrification, and if not miserable then always overworked conditions, holding a broader long-term vision for a better society. While decolonialism and self-organising requires consciousness, unlearning and self-education in our current context, autonomy is not an unreachable utopia but the only genuinely egalitarian, oppression-free and communal form of social organisation which has already existed in our history, and still does in some communities. A process where different movements and cooperatives are already bringing food and turning a guiding direct action-based light on, paving the way. An easy one to believe in once it is being built in front of us. And the only opportunity for humanity’s potential not only to fully be, but to fully become.
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Cristina Morales
Cristina Morales is a London-based Spanish cultural activist. With a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona and a MA in Arts & Culture Production from the Open University of Catalonia, she has become a socially engaged curator, writer and self-taught artist linking art with politics. She works for freelance projects and public, private and nonprofit organisations using arts & culture as an agency tool to challenge society on identity, decolonialism and community development. In addition to being the founding curator of the first decolonial thinktank mapping Cultural Activism worldwide Counterspace, and the founding artist of the Situationist brand of political designs and performances Totem Taboo, she also writes on decoloniality and counternarratives, human and community development through art, and African and African Diaspora arts & culture for national, international and specialised media such as El Mundo; Humanities, Arts & Society; Gods and Radicals; Wiriko; and Radio Africa.