This is My Life… Where is Our Future?
Posted by Rosa Harris on December 13, 2010
Rosa Harris, photo: Monte
by Rosa Harris
I live confined to this housing project, surrounded by bone-hard poverty and everything it brings with it.
If our car is broken, we are literally pinned down. We can’t get out – not to doctors, not to meet political comrades.
But there is something deeper about the hole we are trapped in… My son thinks of little other than getting out. And he isn’t thinking so much about getting “the people” out – but of getting away from the people.
My mind has always dreamed of a better world, but my daily experience is here, in a place where you just can’t romanticize “the oppressed.” Up close, people are often caught up in some terrible stuff. It’s not just the capitalists who live in a dog-eat-dog world, it’s us too. The dominant ideas of an epoch become dominant ideas among the people themselves.
I’m not going to apologize again for my moods and my conflicted thoughts — even though I feel I need to. The other day something happened that made me feel very ashamed and hurt.
Mary, one of my few friends here in this project is a crack user. Her daughter is a prostitute. And her son recently got out of prison.
I’ve never understood completely what the word “lumpen” means in our communist language – but these are part of a broken section of the people. Desperate. And at times, using each other… badly. And yet, she is one of my only friends here. And what does that say about me, and my life?
I should tell the whole story I suppose. I know you won’t blame me.
Mary brought her son by. To meet me, she said.
My boy friend was getting ready to take me to the store and we were practically out the door. I walked into the kitchen and Mary handed me a sack in each hand – each small, wrapped in cellophane. I looked at what they were and tried to put them back into her hands. She kept pressing them toward me.
I don’t know why she was trying to hand them to me in the first place. I could tell she was cracked out. Was she wanting to hide it in my place?
I said “I got to go to the bathroom” – just to get out of the situation.
I didn’t want to out to my boyfriend that they had brought this shit into our apartment. We don’t use it. We don’t want it around. And he doesn’t want me hanging with Mary. I’m always covering for my friend when she does stupid stuff like that when she’s cracking out on me. Mary had stolen my laptop once – which is one of the few things of value I own– my connection to the world. But then we got it back afterwards.
I went to the store, came back and went to her place to let her know that this had not been ok..
Her son and daughter showed up and confronted me. They said they wanted “their money.” Even though I don’t use that shit, even though I was angry they had brought it over, even though I hadn’t bought anything. He was threatening me. And made me go to the ATM with them. They were desperate for quick cash, and the whole thing was an excuse. It was theft.
I’ve known the daughter for a long time, and she never treated me this way before. My friend Mary watched this, saying nothing. She didn’t stand up for me, or call him off. I couldn’t believe this was happening. It felt like being raped — like I’m watching myself and my life, and my pain happening outside me — powerless.
I feel like an idiot for not just outing them in front of my boy friend – cuz it meant he was not there standing with me. I feel like an idiot for staying friends with them even though they had hurt me before. But I’m just so alone at times.
But suddenly I was “going” with them to the ATM, and giving them all my remaining money – a few hundred dollars. Everything.
I need people, and these women were among my the only friends – and yet they turned on me, and ripped me off. Something that happens every day here, among the people.
It is so hard and desperate here. My kid gets threatened and arrives home breathing hard. He talks of things he’s seen, and things he fears. He thinks of arming himself (which terrifies me) or simply act invisible… or somehow getting out.
It took me a few days to even tell my boy friend because I was afraid of what he would say. He turned out to be very understanding, but still said “You shouldn’t hang out with people like that” — which puts blame on me again.
I have the horrible feeling I should be blamed. Now I am also out a friend and my money. But don’t we also lose our hope — piece by piece?
And part of me knows, of course, where the blame belongs. There is a system that put us here. There is a hopelessness we are all injected with. There are circuits of empire that bring the drugs here, and run the prisons (which are just training camps for brutalization and mutual torture).
But often that system feels far away. And that blame feels very abstract. And our immediate oppressors are so often each other… as we claw each other, and brutalize each other in our despair and madness.
I even wonder why I use “we” here. I don’t claw anyone. I don’t brutalize anyone. We divide up, don’t we, once again, into victims, abusers and indifferent observers. We live in a time when, here a least, there is so little solidarity or glimpse of a bigger picture. Here people are often broken, and it is hard to imagine where the unity or vision could come for changing anything.
My son said “The people here are so fucked up, they don’t deserve communism and would mess it up if they had it.”
I don’t believe that, of course. I never have. But I just want to share, honestly, how from here everything just feels so bleak sometimes. How do we show up here, as communists, and change people’s choice, and change the people themselves?
Are these really the people that can become the rulers of society? And how do we help that happen?
This has been a hard moment, and right now the whole world seems dark to me. And, the money thing really bothers me. I’m lucky its December – the food pantries give away a lot of food during the holidays.
And I have you, my comrades, around the world: I have your ear, and I have whatever we manage to create together.
RW Harvey said
What a fucking nightmare. Yes, it is the system in all its gruesome brutality, turning us against each other and, as I hear your inner thoughts, comrade Rosa, against our own selves.
I have to agree with your son: some people, at this stage, would ruin communism. It tells me that the process will be hard and gruelling, and there will be obstacles and real enemies found among the people themselves. There are minds, hearts, and spirits so broken and devastated they become like Golem in Lord of the Rings, with sheer survival their “precious.”
It also tells me the power of vision, the vision that you hold so tenaciously.
We have much work to do, to change conditions and change consciousness.
Seditious said
Sister, I am totally feeling you and the exhausting pain. I’m going to finish reading your IWD letter about the women’s shelter, and look forward to writing to you tomorrow. But if you’re checking tonight online somehow, the good news is the same as the bad news: you are NOT alone. And we’ve gotta find ways to support each other.
I admire your inner steel. And i have some, too…
cigar guy said
Comrade Rosa, there are many “contradictions among the people”.
Anton Black said
Rosa–
Nightmare for sure.
Seditious said: “…the good news is the same as the bad news: you are NOT alone. And we’ve gotta find ways to support each other.”
The thought occurs to me that this might not be a one time ripoff– these folks may be trying to force you into some of their shit in an ongoing way. You’ll need all possible support networking, including this online community, especially if this is the case.
carldavidson said
The projects are often destroyers of working class life.
They weren’t at the beginning, but first the system’s rules drove out families with a regular income that was ‘too high.’ Then they drove out fathers, splitting up intact families. Then they provide ‘assistance’ that no one can survive on without subsidizing it from the ‘underground’ economy, ie, trade in drugs and women. That’s the ‘dirty little secret’ of welfare ‘reform’ and our entire system of ‘public assistance.’
The result is what Rosa describes.
Every human being needs three things–meaning, structure and community. Where she lives, all three are dysfunctional, for the most part. She has meaning, a strong conviction in socialism, communism and a better world. She has to seek out the other two, whether its a church, a settlement house, a nearby school with evening programs, whatever she can find that will offer the solidarity that comes with structures involving the working class and the communities they help shape.
We describe the lumpen as ‘demoralized’ for a reason. They have abandoned or had driven out of them or have never known the working-class and family morality based on solidarity–which, by the way, is quite different than the ‘don’t snitch’ morality of the prison. For them, we have to find them regular employment. The practical activity of being in the working class can then assist in regaining working-class values and consciousness that isn’t conflicted and self-sabotaged with ‘the thug life’. That’s easy to say, and hard to do.
So there are no easy answers, only a hard path. I know dedicated organizers who have stopped working these areas, turning instead to immigrant communities where family and working-class values still hang on. It’s no solution overall, only a practical solution for them.
Andrei Kuznetsov said
I too had many similar experiences in my life growing up in northeastern Nashville, TN. Except perhaps replace “crack” with “meth”.
Our class feels so much despair that we lose touch with our humanity so easily. I feel at times as though I’ve lost touch with mine as well.
I know that feeling all too well. I sometimes get frustrated with how other communists act towards the effects of the system on our behavior and social interactions.
To quote Dr. Hannibal Lecter M.D. from The Silence of the Lambs:
Roxanne Amico said
This is so beautiful, Rosa! Thank you, Sister. Thank you.
Dialectic Sines said
This is a very sad story because it reflects the truth that the ideological outgrowth of capitalist material relations creates a mentality of isolation amongst all people. Isolation from control over one’s own circumstances harbors the feeling that no one has control, thus making it harder to pinpoint who is friend or foe, making everyone complicit. I think that in situations like your own, the best thing you can do is to remain steadfast in heart and mind of our shared hope that it is possible to give people ultimate control over our own destiny. If you are genuine in your beliefs, as you most certainly are, then when you engage with people about those beliefs, communism or otherwise, something sticks; novel ideas manifest themselves deep, seeds to grow and such.
Of course, when you are being robbed it is not the time to engage in such matters, rather than to do what it takes to get away without physical injury. It is hard to say how to approach your friend or what to do if you are approached by her. I think perhaps the best thing is to put some time in between the incident and make contact again. And if/when you meet again to discuss what happened, do it in a public place. Terribly sorry for what happened comrade, all of my condolences.
Barry Lyndon said
I live on the South Side of Chicago, and my mother works as a librarian in an all-black inner city school. These sorts of stories are all too common, of people ripping each other off, beating each other, even killing each other, like they have no sense of community at all. At the school my mother works at, the school’s main disciplinary officer was arrested for trying to rob a bank. Just a block away from where I live, there was a gang killing right in front of a public school.
Like Rosa says, of course in a larger sense one blames the capitalist system for creating the conditions in which people are literally reduced to tearing each other to pieces. Chicago there is a long history of racial discrimination in real estate and the public school system, no doubt. And certainly there is severe police brutality that represses the people- the John Burge case, in my view, is probably the tip of the iceberg.
But you have to draw the line somewhere, because there are plenty of people in oppressed communities(black ghetto, Hispanic barrios, Native American reservations, poor whites in Appalachia), who struggle to survive while keeping their humanity in the process. At a certain point, individual responsibility does come in.
Revolutionaries need to be willing to not only criticize the oppressors of the poor, but the poor’s bad and self-destructive habits. It is not “racist” or “blaming the victim” to do so. Look at how Mao criticized the drug addiction and patriarchy of pre-revolutionary China. Look at how Trotsky denounced the fatalism and religious superstition of Jews in Czarist Russia. Look at how Malcolm X scrutinized the self-hatred of blacks in mid-20th century America.
A revolutionary criticism of the weaknesses of the oppressed is with the objection of removing such shackles from their body so that they can rise to their feet and cast off their master. As opposed to the liberal who will excuse such failings by invoking multi-culturalism, or a right-winger who will point to such problems as proof of “those people’s” inherent moral failings.
Labor Shall Rule said
There can be no moral condemnation of oppressed culture (which is, in reality, an expression of dominant ideas) without a revolutionary movement that can win demands that better the lot of the oppressed themselves. Everything else, in my opinion, would (indirectly or directly) strengthen the culture of poverty narrative that is really strong right now with the resurgence of the far-right.
Selling drugs, while illegal, is a far more secure (albeit more dangerous) and even fun way to make cash in comparison to working at some repetitive and low-wage job. Collecting copper and stainless steel scrap and knowing the value behind it all, while again not a stable or fully legal profession, is another way of avoiding that kind of work. The “lumpen” can be anyone at any unfortunate time of their life, who feel compelled by both an intense physiological and physical need to get cash as easily as possible. I’ve seen some disabled students, with little independent disposable income, sell their pain meds to prevent their loans from defaulting. I’ve met a single parent mother that sold weed between jobs to pay the bills. Everyone can be “lumpen,” it is not a fixed social category by any means.
J.Assange said
Thank you for sharing. Very touching story filled with the ugly truth that is Amerikkka, today. One point that comes across is that we can’t romanticize people. We are contradictions and reflections of the social relations we are enmeshed in. Its a dialectical problem: To free ourselves we need to be able to rise above the oppressive relations we help perpetuate; but to rise up, need to break those chains, but to break the chain we need to be able to rise up… Many people, won’t be able to, it takes others in other social conditions, classes (other than the lumpen) to join forces with them to help get the revolutionary ball in motion, as it will take all the oppressed sections of the people, to carry it forward to the end, as they transform themselves and the world around it.
It’s important to realize that the mess we have now can radically change. There is always an illusion of permanence, and to look at “human nature.” Unlike others, I do think there is a human nature (which we don’t fully understand yet), but its very flexible and able to transform ourselves given different conditions.
Personal advise, which you probably already know and have tried but feel compelled to give it anyway….I would find a way NOT to live in the projects. You don’t need anyone to tell you that its not good—esp. for your son to be exposed to these harsh realities and will cause him to become cynical for humanity, given he is being exposed to, and its not safe. Its no place to raise a child. I’d move. Move anywhere better. Lots of places to live that would be far better, including outside the US.
Now that you are there, you need to do some organizing. Seek out the most advanced elements. Put politics in command to get people to see and feel empowered. Create that community and solidarity, to the extend that it is possible. This way you have others “have your back.” You should involve your boyfriend, and not leave him out again. Don’t isolate yourself. And, be able to realize who is your friend and who is not. Mary is not your friend. She is rather backwards, at this stage. What I’m saying is not easy, and easier said than done…but try to turn a bad thing into a good thing. The people who live there would, I bet, be interested in transforming things to make it better for their families. Can they best do this be banding together for change, or staying isolated? Its a question of what kind of politics are going to be put in force. Look at the prisons in Peru, during the Shinning Path’s days. They turned those institutions around. So if you must stay, network and build your community with the most advanced elements that can at the very least provide for your own sense of security.
Mike E said
LSR writes:
What about this: I think we have to tell the truth — to ourselves and the people.
I am concerned about the idea that telling some truths is immoral because we don’t like the implications of the idea (or its possible impact), or because the political stars aren’t alligned just right, or because we don’t have the prerequisite political strength.
And I am wary of assuming that the discussion of an idea can only have one impact (unless we already have a revolutionary movement). I don’t think we can build a revolutionary movement without grappling with where the people are, and where different sectors are.
I don’t think Malcolm X waited until he had a movement before calling out real slavishness and self-destructive behavior among the people — it was part of the attraction that built a movement.
We can’t say this because it would strengthen that? How about we have a commitment to hard truths and honesty? Won’t the people welcome that?
Further, there is a culture of poverty (or several different cultures arising out of poverty), and everyone knows it. And there is also a liberal denial of those reality, and an all-too-familiar romanticization and mythologizing of the oppressed. Why can’t we knock that back with truths? Won’t the people themselves think we are fools if we don’t?
Can we go among the oppressed and build a revolutionary movement without a discussion of the conditions they see around them every day?
Think about the young man in this story who says: ““The people here are so fucked up, they don’t deserve communism and would mess it up if they had it.” How would you answer that view (which arises from deep and painful experiences)? We can’t condemn people robbing each other? Killing each other over nothing? Brutalizing each other with fists and knives and bottles? Why not? And why can’t we do it in a way different from the rightist theory of “personal responsibility” that blames the poor for their poverty?
There is a political theory of “main enemy” (where we can attack the Tea Party but need to go soft on Obama), and I suppose there might be an ideology parallel theory: Where we can attack the right’s theory of “personal responsibility,” but not dare speak about the actual problems and antagonisms among the people?
The lumpen (in my view) are hard-core career criminals (in the main), and then those most “broken” at the bottem (homeless derelicts, drug addicts, etc.) Many working class people move in and out of “gray” economy — semi-prostitution, periphery of gang life as kids, minor crime and theft…. But that is largely a typical part of life for working class youth (in the main), not of some criminal class. Many people in gangs are not lumpen, but the people at the core of the gangs (OGs for life) are.
carldavidson said
Fun? What if it’s your kid, LSR, that’s the one doing the buying, and gets strung out on crack or meth. Remember, less than half of those in programs become able to deal with their addictions.
Collecting copper or stainless as scrap is one thing, but what if the pipes and sink in your kitchen is considered ‘scrap’?
We can assert the moral values rooted in solidarity anytime, especially when people on both sides of a moral quandry are suffering from the lack of them. We’re not closet liberal relativists wrapped up in revolutionary rhetoric–at least i hope not.
Miles Ahead said
Dearest Rosa, Hermana Gitana,
I have had the privilege of having many chats with you in the past. We have connected on many levels and have a friendship. But I think all of us, who want and are trying to work for a better world are indebted) to you for what you had the guts to write. And what you wrote is in no small way a part of our (and the people’s) collective struggle.
Two of the things that jumped out– when you first said,
And then—
As far as “romanticizing” the oppressed, because many of us are coming from different life experiences (backgrounds and political views), and even though much of the glue that unites us is a shared vision and dream of a better world, with all the “refinements” within that, I not only think there is a tendency to “romanticize” the oppressed, and how they/we have actually been affected by the system we abhor, there is also a tendency to over-intellectualize what is unfortunately the raw and gritty life experience for many people. And because we yearn so deeply for those radical ruptures and revolutionary changes, sometimes we pull out some rhetoric that is supposed to make the profound contradictions all right or go away.
As you know, I can totally identify with what you are saying, and certainly when you say you are “not going to apologize for your moods and conflicted thoughts.” Those conflicted thoughts are important and very real, and need ongoing dialogue.
Some of us, including you, have been groomed to think that if we do raise or are experiencing real-life contradictions among the people, we’re going to run the risk of being labeled “defeatist”; or somehow, we’ve lost “our” revolutionary zeal;not looking at the “big picture” or that it’s strictly “personal.” But the reality is that many people are swept up in what often times feels overwhelming and desperate, no matter how much you try to analyze it all, and be oh-so politically correct.
So, it is not a mystery to me that you would say, re apologizing, “even though I feel I need to.”
The contradictions, not only among the people, but within ourselves, need to be taken seriously, and not reduced to some jargon, or rhetorical pablum. We, collectively, are also struggling against what could be construed as a voluntarist tendency, and some of us have been overly-groomed in voluntarism. For me, that is a lot where that feeling of much of what we’re purporting, with loftier ideas, (maybe superficially)feels so abstract, even mechanical.
At the beginning of this year, someone sent me a missive about Mexico, and how first there was the war of independence in 1810, then the revolution of 1910, so this person was proposing that … wow, it’s 2010, and it was looking good for the next Mexican revolution. Every hundred years, right? Say what? Meanwhile, you’re living in a mini-police/military super repressive state, the people en masse are living in overwhelming poverty, justifiable fear, violence on a grand scale, senseless deaths/killings even among your beloved friends, with some betrayals and violence among the people toward each other, no cohesive political movement, and you think you’ve just read some sci-fi article.
It becomes a struggle to put things in perspective, although we all try. And I still believe we can draw much inspiration not only from the collectivity and political struggle on say Kasama, but draw inspiration from our sisters and brothers around the world, who do rise up against their oppression, poverty, et al., even if it is momentary. It does make one feel a whole lot less isolated.
In friendship…
Miles Ahead said
P.S. on the lumpen. When the Panthers formed the band, “The Lumpen” I had been working closely with them for several years. Got into some pretty heated arguments around glorifying the lumpen, but at the time lost that battle.
NSPF said
Mother To Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
_______
Langston Hughes
rosa harris said
Thank you NSPF for posting this poem. I came across it in high school and was really struck by it. My mom fought so hard to feed us 4 kids on a hairdresser’s pay with a husband sick with kidney failure. I really identified with the intense feelings that it was expressing and still do.
jp said
if it was my kid strung out on whatever drug, i would not want him or her to be assigned judgmentally to a category like lumpen. dickens’ line about the caterpillar up on the tree leaf looking down at his brother on the ground comes to mind.
…and i most certainly would not want any community approach other than a public health one not involving the police/judicial system.
Mike E said
Class analysis is not a moral judgement — it is class analysis.
Youth are often in a great deal of motion (as far as class position) especially in the U.S. — and the issue here is not “assigning” kids to some class in order to “look down” on them.
The issue is understanding what is happening among the people, what the longterm interests of the people are, and also how to handle some very acute contradictions among the people.
People from many different classes are “strung out.” And the issue isn’t even simple legality… (why would a weed dealer be a “lumpen” but a beer distributor be a small business man?) Lumpen are career criminals — who often make their living fucking over other poor people (burglarizing their homes, robbing small stores and mailboxes, etc.) Some are “lumpen bourgeoisie” (i.e. mobsters, etc. with big payrolls and inventory).
You seem to make it moralistic, and then say we can’t discuss it because we can’t make moral judgements about contradictions among the people. In fact, we can and should make judgements when people get fucked over (including if it is by their neighbors, or their spouses, or some stranger who climbs in a window.)
Obviously there are issues of scale.
Otto said
Rosa;
You write some good stuff. I have you on facebook and after reading this I am really glad.
I considered myself to have been a lumpen proletariat many years ago, being a street dealer. I was inspired that Mao had considered people as myself as “a potential revolutionary class.” Of course we had to change in order to become revolutionary, but the point is that someone believed in the lowest classes–that they could rise above their shitty existence.
As with any class of people there are those who have revolutionary potential and those who don’t. It is ridiculous write off a whole class of people, especially when they are a class at the bottom of society.
There are working class people who are hoplessly conservative.
In my opinion it goes back to the slogan;
“liberation for the masses,
no need for the stupid asses.”
Mike Haywood said
There is another side to this reality that is more encouraging. I read a sociological study several years ago (sorry I don’t have the citation) about African-American women living in similar circumstances, and the point of the study was to address why they could not/did not ever escape poverty. What the study found was that there was an ethic of sharing, of mutual responsibility, and that whenever an individual got a job and made some money, they immediately shared it with others in their circle. Consequently, no individuals were able to rise up and out of the situation. Not to minimize the reality here, or to say it is not widespread, only to point out that is not a systematic study and that the multi-faceted reality is more complex, and perhaps more promising.
rosa harris said
Mike Haywood,
There are positive sides. There are times that the car was broken down or whatever that in fact Mary carried me to the grocery store when we would have just had to go without or spend our stamps at the corner store. She’s come over many times to help me clean the apartment because I am disabled. We let her daughter access our internet wireless connection till she could get her own. We’ve made trips together to food pantries and shared knowledge of resources and the resources themselves – trading with each other for what we need out of what we could get. And then there is being there emotionally for each other, too.
But I wouldn’t say that sharing is why people don’t get out of poverty! That just does not make sense when you think about it. People share to work out ways to survive under these conditions and the people can be very creative when it comes to that.
But these conditions also cause things like giving up some sex to get your car fixed or to get a ride or whatever- something I’ve been lucky to never have to do but that’s also part of surviving for many women under these conditions.
Roi said
[moderator: we have moved Roi's comment to its own post on Kasama Main]
Anton Black said
The system is basically capitalism– a global market economy in which the basis of all wealth is a particular commodity, labor power (people’s ability to work).
land said
Women get in situations. When I was younger I had a friend with 3 kids. We had different lives but she knew she could rely on me.
One day she came over with her kids. She said I am not going to make my rent this month. Can you watch the kids tonite? I said sure. I did what I could.
I was very upset about your story. And the other stories. What does one do? We do have to do something and it has to be in line with who we are.
lycophidion said
Rosa, your words are powerful reminders for us to keep our feet on the ground! I don’t want to go into a long, platitudinous rap about how the ruling class atomizes us, alienates us from ourselves, renders us powerless. We do what we have to to survive, but just as none of us is beyond barbarity, none of us is beyond redemption, in a personal and political sense. That was something I lived. Those, such as yourself, who are capable of keeping their bearing, are the key to that redemption for those like your friend Mary. Small comfort right now, I know. But, all of these messages should let you know that you are loved and supported.
Adrienne said
Read this yesterday — so powerful. Wrung me out. I couldn’t even make a comment. Because there seem to be no words other than: I’m so sorry for what you’re going through, and I wish I could help in some way.
Land wrote:
I know one thing that Rosa must do. Keep writing!
I think you have an incredible talent and a lot to say, Rosa. Even if everything seems dark, I really hope you’ll keep following the spark that makes you write so movingly and eloquently.
NSPF said
You remind me, Rosa, of an old advert for Heineken I saw somewhere long ago:
“Heineken: it reaches parts (hearts?) other beers can’t.”
Templeton said
thank you Rosa….. this was uplifting
Tell No Lies said
Adrienne is right, Rosa. Your voice matters. You write eloquently on experiences that rarely get that sort of treatment and it enriches and helps ground all of our efforts to connect communist theory with living practice.
Obviously this piece touched a nerve and that is so important to what we are trying to do. It would really be great if you could write more regularly here about your daily experiences, your conversations with people, your thoughts on how to make the connections and so on.
Suzy Subways said
I think I always find these discussions a few days late, so pardon my late comment, but I was really touched by this really honest piece of writing by Rosa. I hope that you are OK, and I am so sorry for what happened and for your loss of a friend.
This reminded me of what my friend is going through as a revolutionary anarchist who works with sex workers who use drugs. There was one night in the women’s support group when some of the women got in a horrible yelling fight about who had the worst abuse history. Yelling their horror stories of domestic violence and sexual assault at each other in a desperate search for validation. My friend said that in those moments she despaired of ever building a society where people could run things ourselves and take care of each other.
I think one distinction that can be made (although I’m not sure it’s relevant to the example I just gave, which is more about the devastating impact of trauma) is between the things people are more likely to do when they are still in their addiction vs. in recovery. I remember one time in a local AIDS activist group, a member stole another member’s laptop and some money that belonged to the group. The member who it was stolen from had allowed the thief/fellow member to stay in his apartment after knowing the person was likely to steal. The group decided by consensus that the member who was stolen from could not be the treasurer any longer. This was not to punish him, but to prevent future theft. That member continued to be a well-respected leader in the group. He stayed in contact with the thief/former member, who is currently in recovery and now does no more harm than flaking out on his tasks, which is still harmful, but less harmful, anyway, and he does offer more to the movement now that he has been through some classes, apologized and made amends, and had more experience working toward a collective purpose.
It’s not useful to say that lots of people are bad people or can’t ever be trusted to collectively run society, but it’s important to remember that, as someone from the Harm Reduction Coalition told me once, it was the drug user’s job to steal the ten dollar bill that he left on his desk. I think that if we can provide housing, food, healthcare, education, etc. for everyone, fewer people will need to fuck each other over. But still, with drug use, a person will get desperately sick if they don’t steal sometimes.
However, once people are in recovery, there is a lot more potential. I think that 12-step programs have their limitations, but they are also amazing in that they offer supportive, collective healing from trauma and a way to move forward. One of the steps is actually about giving back and helping others. John Bell from ACT UP used this idea to organize people in recovery houses to become AIDS activists. This idea has incredible untapped potential. People in recovery also often need things to fill their time, they like to go to meetings, they want a way to give back to society so they can feel better about themselves….
Suzy Subways said
The idea of self-transformation and giving back to society by transforming it is possibly best put into words by Reconstruction, INC.:
http://www.reconstructioninc.org/drupal/
“CHANGING OURSELVES TO Change the World, by Uniting the many to bring about Freedom, Self-Determination, and, to end, Racism, Sexism and Discrimination”
Tell No Lies said
There is a passage in Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution where he discusses precisely the transformation in the course of the revolution of people who seeemed completely ground down by the system and beyond redemption prior to revolution. Its very interesting and hopeful.
Control Alt Delete said
I don’t know your back story Rosa but I feel the need to tell you that you need the lowdown on addiction ASAP. Unfortunately the Left has concerned itself little with the realities of addiction — as it’s own organizational history will attest. You will need to reach outside of the revolutionary milieu unfortunately for the knowledge and insight you desperately need. Sometimes theory can be blinding.
You need to stop enabling your friend. Period. You were the victim of an act of aggression by her child that she did nothing to stop. Don’t think it will end with this one occurrence. There’s a profound difference between solidarity and victimhood. Read Suzy Subways post above.
I know what’s it’s like to be disabled and poor in this society, trust me. Unfortunately as long as your friend is using you should be very wary of letting her into your apartment — and in your life.