Author: Slingshot Collective

Available at www.dogtownredemption.com

Dogtown Redemption (2015) tells the story of some of the poorest of America’s poor, West Oakland’s street recyclers. It focuses on 3 such individuals and allows them to speak for themselves while capturing on film the grim realities of their day-to-day lives. It also captures their humanity, intelligence and capacity for love.

7 years in the making, Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush’s first film dignifies it’s subjects without pandering to liberal sentimentalism, Christian morality or hopeless cynicism. The stories of Landon Goodwin, Hayok Kay and Jason Witt, diverse in their backgrounds but united in their determination to survive, highlight life on the lowest rung of American society as well as the callousness of those who are better off. The film also delves into the politics of gentrification, nimbyism and our culture’s pathetic reliance on police for resolving complex social problems….all hot topics as the flood of tech money washes over the East Bay and displaces longstanding communities of lesser means. The film is particularly pertinent as City of Oakland fines and restrictive ordinances shuttered Alliance Recycling in August 2016, effectively eliminating the marginal livelihoods of the people the film gives voice to. Sweeps of Oakland’s homeless encampments are happening as I type this review, the war on the urban poor is in full swing in the Bay Area with no end in sight.

The Yuppie new comers of West Oakland and the City Council come off rather poorly in this story but the filmmakers make no claim to easy answers and allow the viewer to experience that unease, a tiny taste of what film’s subjects endure on a daily basis. I recommend you see this movie if you can.

(d. o.)

Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

The 2017 Slingshot Organizer’s Radical Contact list has dozens of corrections and updates, but below are a few radical spaces that we missed. It is super inspiring as well as exhausting going through and updating the list each summer. Thanks to everyone who helped and all the projects that contacted us. This year, we couldn’t find anyone to update Latin America or parts of Europe, so if you want to volunteer to update those lists, contact us. We’re still missing lots of regions, so if you know of contacts we missed, fill us in. The on-line contact list at slingshot.tao.ca/contacts has the latest updates.

Wasted Ink Zine Distro – Tempe, AZ

A small library and store that hosts events and serves as “a home base for Arizona zinesters.” 2121 W University Dr, Ste 110, Tempe, AZ 85281, wizd-az.com

Hive Mind – Akron, OH

A collectively run art space and all ages music venue for music, poetry, film, crafting, food preservation and anything you might be interested in sharing. Participation and experimentation is encouraged. 373 W Exchange St. Akron, OH 44302 gestaltcollectivebooking@gmail.com

Alaska Center for Alternative Lifestyles – Anchorage, AK

A safe meeting place for queer, poly, and alternative lifestyles people with workshops on non-monogamous relationships, safety and the gender spectrum. 420 W. 3rd Ave. Anchorage, AK 99501 907-775-8419, alaskakink.com

Land of Plenty – Akron, OH

They have herbs, books and local art. 339 W. Market St. Akron OH, 44303 330-703-5633 landofplentyakron.com

Identity Inc. – Anchorage, AK

A non-profit queer safe space that hosts support groups. 336 E. 5th Ave. Anchorage, AK 99501 907-929-4528, identityinc.org

Berkeley Animal Rights Center

A community center supporting animal rights and social justice with a vegan store, communal work area, meeting location, event space, yoga studio and art gallery. Open Mon-Fri: 11am-7pm. 2425 Channing Way, Suite C, Berkeley, CA 94704, 510-984-0865 berkeleyarc.com

Feral Space Collective – Elgin, IL

A queer, vegan straight edge/sober anarchist space in an apartment that operates a zine distro. They host travelers in a guest room but can’t publish their address for security reasons. xtheferalspacex@riseup.net or theferalspacecollectivexvx.blogspot.com.

 

Battery Street Jeans Exchange – Burlington, VT

A store that hosts shows and art exhibits. 7 Marble Ave. Burlington, VT 05401. 802-865-6223.

• • •

By the way, Slingshot is published out of the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley. I’ve staffed the Sunday 6-9 shift for 23 years. My shifts continue to be fun and meaningful and I’m glad I can keep doing them even now that I have a 4 year old daughter. On a typical shift, a handful of people will drop by to look at zines, check a book out from the library, buy something, or ask questions. About half are travelers and I try to suggest interesting places to visit during their stay or connect them with local activities. The other half are people walking by. In the winter I host movies and over the summer and other times there are a lot of Slingshot meetings. There are usually 1 or 2 “regulars” who are either wingnut activist-types or homeless people here to use the public computer, the toilet, or sometimes chat. I fill the gaps with cleaning, bookkeeping, and doing Slingshot-related chores. I almost always leave my shift feeling happy that I came in and better about the space than I expected I would when I arrived.

Nonetheless, in general the Long Haul is struggling and has been struggling for 20+ years. Recently, the number of volunteers has dwindled so much that we’re having trouble keeping all the shifts staffed, resulting in a vicious cycle of decline because the collective isn’t investing enough time in outreach to find new volunteers or organizing events that would attract them. Long Haul has a terrible reputation amongst activists in the Bay Area for being dominated by homeless people or the Anarchist Study Group, being messy, politically embarrassing and stuck in its ways. There are only a handful of weekly events and projects, which is a shame because it leaves huge chunks of time and space with nothing going on. There’s also 2 vacant offices . . .

Everyone I know at Long Haul seems to agree that the project needs renewal — more events, better organization, new projects and more communities plugged in. I want to sincerely invite folks around the bay area to drop by and consider staffing a shift or hosting a meeting or event. A re-boot can ultimately only happen if some new people with fresh energy and ideas get involved.

 

Josh Lipson, who cooked with East Bay Food Not Bombs and helped with many recent Slingshot bulk mailings, died in his sleep of heart failure in Oakland June 12. He was 39 years old. Josh’s death came as a shock to his many friends since he appeared to be in perfect health. Josh was a generous, fun-loving free spirit who frequented the punk and activist scene. Before moving to Oakland he lived in San Diego and he grew up in rural Ohio.

Josh was an auto mechanic. He dreamt of opening a car garage where people could access tools and learn to fix their own vehicles. He lived at and helped fix up several East Bay housing squats. He helped pick up and drop off food for Food Not Bombs and helped serve food at People’s Park. He protested against police abuse, for Black Lives Matter and against anti-abortion nuts. He loved wine, life and was an absurdist.

He was one of the countless people who do the invisible work that keeps Slingshot in print. We always have a struggle to get the 10,000+ copies mailing to the post office because it is physically too big and heavy to move via bike trailer, which is how we move most everything else. Josh was anxious to use his jeep to give the mailing a lift.

He also drove Slingshot to the Los Angeles Zine Fest in 2014 where he parked his jeep in front of the event’s entrance and invited passers-by to write or draw on his car. It was quickly filled with fascinating slogans and weird art including “Ha Society I Win. I get to Write on a Car!” For months he continued to encourage people to contribute to the dialog happening on what was often his home. Later, that night of the zine fest, the Slingshot zine crew decided to check out a drive-in movie. At the ticket booth and operating on pure charm he convinced the cashier that it was “Two-for-one nite.”

You could tell from his smile and the way he carried himself that he was special and that he was about helping people and trying to make the world a better place. We miss him.

 

Longtime community activist “Midnight” Matt Dodt, a stalwart volunteer with East Bay Food Not Bombs and many other actions and causes for justice in the Bay Area, died unexpectedly May 27, 2016 of heart failure while working on a construction job in San Francisco. He was 59 years old.

Working for justice and equality became a lifestyle for Matt when he was in his early 20s, and persisted until his death. He first came to California with his partner in 1981, where they were involved in housing rights protests in Isla Vista near UCSB. In 1984 Matt protested the Republican National Convention in Dallas. He was one of the co-plaintiffs in the famous flag burning case that originated with Joey Jackson. The U.S. Supreme Court heard their case and decided that the issue was a form of free speech. At the RNC Matt met Rev. Jim and years later the two of them would hold it down each Mardi Gras and take over the streets of Berkeley for a funky and truly chaotic parade.

Around 1988 Matt moved to California from Texas by riding his bicycle and camping. He worked intermittently as a bike messenger for a long time. He was a regular at Critical Mass.

Matt was heavily involved in preserving People’s Park from being developed by UC Berkeley. He fought off the construction of a volleyball court in the early 1990’s and he was there to stop the clear cutting of trees ten years ago. Matt was also on hand making the Park a beautiful place by working on the stage, rebuilding the free box and was a regular at Food Not Bombs.

Matt was not strictly vegan but very much committed to following a vegetarian diet for ethical reasons from age 23 or so on…pretty much his whole adult life. He was the bottom liner for the Sunday FNB cookhouse for over a decade and he was always willing and able to do the cooking, serving and cleaning by-himself when no one else would help.

When a direct action would run overnight, Matt would stay awake during the dead hours serving food, cop watching and running interference with crazy people while most people slept. After many years of this, the name “Midnight Matt” stuck.

Matt was on hand at almost every major protest in the Bay. Protests against war and racism, against police abuse and the rich, in defense of nature, the homeless or Occupy. He was often on the front line holding a video camera to capture any police abuse. Matt bought a new video camera last fall with some money that he had after this older brother died a year or two ago. After his death the camera was donated to the Liberated Lens Collective for other activists to continue his work of DIY documentation.

Matt identified as “deep anarchist” for a long time but felt very alienated from where the “movement” and the “radical community” seemed to be taking that.

Matt was a hard worker; he despised anything done half-assed and applied himself thoroughly, whether the work he was doing was paid or volunteer. He was strong and capable, and his fine-motor coordination was excellent; he was good with all kinds of tools and with repairing things with his hands. Matt valued his abilities as a laborer and his almost Herculean strength in transporting all sorts of materials by bicycle. He had a readable, almost calligraphic handwriting that was easy on the eyes. And though he sometimes came off as gruff or distant to people who did not know him well, Matt had a deep compassion for human foibles other than his own.

Sometimes when someone dies, especially while still relatively young, we say “If only he could know how much he was loved.” Matt’s problem was a little different from that: he never really accepted that he was deserving of love. He was grateful for the love and support of his chosen family and community in the Bay Area, but there were times he wanted to tell us, and indeed times that he told us, that we were fools for liking him as much as we did.

One can hope that wherever we go after we leave our worn-out bodies behind, Matt was able, at last, to let go of that self-blame and self-hatred that too often got the best of him.

Matt loved children and often provided loving care for the children of his friends who were working parents in the activist community He read to kids and had a wry sense of humor with them, and with the many people of all ages and all walks of life with whom he interacted. Matt had no children of his own, and only a few close friends knew that Matt was a loving stepfather who raised his partner’s baby Gypsy as his own and loved her deeply. One of his almost untold sorrows was losing track of this precious baby girl when the relationship dissolved; there was seldom a time he did not think of her.

Matt was smart, funny, and resourceful, and built community in his own way wherever he went.

 

By Chalk

We, a team of 2-5 people, have recently completed a 750-plus-mile journey on bicycle following the route of a crude oil pipeline, the aging Enbridge Line 5, which originates in Superior, Wisconsin, snakes east through the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan, and ends at a massive refinery in Sarnia, Canada. For 57 days we spent almost every day on the road visiting every single house along the pipeline route to engage community in conversation about the issues surrounding Line 5 and why it is a ticking time bomb in the Straits of Mackinac.

We’ve pushed ourselves to various physical and mental limits. From being on the road outside everyday, our skin is much tanner; our bodies are tired and need some sort of deeper rest. Our brains have practically been reprogrammed so that we’re walking, talking Line 5 debating machines. We’ve had so many conversations about this Enbridge pipeline that we both better understand what the pipeline means to a diversity of different folks, AND why despite all that diversity, it still needs to be shut down.

We’re not clueless to the reality that in a world being dangerously altered by climate change, we’re still addicted to fossil fuel, even as we’re aware of the addiction. But we can’t let addictions destroy ourselves, not with the planet at stake. We’ve seen Enbridge destroy the Kalamazoo River because for 17 hours in 2010, three Enbridge shift operators decided that when the emergency alarm was buzzing, it was better to err on the side of pumping more crude than risk a multinational energy giant losing a few hours of profit.

Our collective addictions are fueling our way of life, and with that comes its consequences.

And it’s not just fossil fuels. Recently, a leak again soiled the Kalamazoo river with 570,000 gallons of sewage. Thanks to the Fukushima meltdown, the North American Pacific coast will be dealing with cancerous radiation for years to come… so what about the nuclear plant nearest you?

As we biked through the Upper Peninsula and Northern Wisconsin, we saw a lot of logging and gravel pit activity. There seems to be a long-term goal there of logging to sell cheap wood, then when the wood is gone, gravel pit mining to build more roads, then when the gravel is gone, blasting the rock underneath to mine for iron ores. And what’s left is nothing. Literally, a hole that fills up with ground water, making it un-potable and toxic, which future generations have to deal with, maybe indefinitely.

Our industrial way of life has and continues to be one which prioritizes short-term profits over long-term sustainability. We’re basically passing the bill for our short-lived extravagances onto our children, and their children, and their children…

Friends, we’re not experts on protecting the water, land and other gifts we’ve been given on this Earth, but we stress that protecting is a proactive effort, and a struggle. It doesn’t suffice merely to WANT clean water, clean air, clean land. It doesn’t suffice to “Like” forward-thinking comments on Facebook, or to vote the right person into office.

As one of the riders often told themself, not just during this journey but in life overall, “if I’m comfortable, then I may not be doing enough”. We urge you all to find creative ways to proactively engage in protecting the water and land and air, to STRUGGLE for it.

 

 

By DJ Chele

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and the first rule of rhetoric is “know your audience”.

You wouldn’t take your newbie skater friend to the skate park and suggest they drop into the vert ramp. Similarly, you shouldn’t drop radical language on uninitiated friends, family and strangers and expect anything but confusion and defensiveness to be reflected back at you. I’m making an assumption: that you care about the well being of your skater buddy. I’m also assuming that when you open your mouth you want what comes out to be understood by whoever is listening. If either of these assumptions are in question, please stop reading now!

“Privilege” is a word that is in high vogue in radical circles. Like many such words, it seems to be causing as much confusion, defensiveness and hurt feelings as it is helping people think in new (and better!) ways. If someone is into bullying people this might be cause for celebration but for anyone working for a better world it might be worthwhile to back up a few steps and examine our language use so we can communicate more effectively.

Here’s Webster’s on the matter:

ˈpriv(ə)lij

1- the advantage that wealthy and powerful people have over other people in a society.

2- a special opportunity to do something that makes you proud.

3- a right or benefit that is given to some people and not others.

I’d say that pretty much covers the “standard” use of the word. So what do radicals mean by “privilege”? How does it differ from Webster’s definition and how might we explain this new use of the word to help our brothers and sisters understand the social reality we share in a better way?

The newer use of the word Privilege goes something like this:

4- an unexamined and unacknowledged right, benefit or advantage that accrues to one person and not to another on the basis of race, class, sex, gender or other social factors, real or perceived.

While some might correct me (and you are welcome to do so), I’d say the “unexamined and unacknowledged” part is the key difference. I think this is why Peggy Macintosh uses of the word “invisible” to describe these benefits in her piece “White Privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack” which introduced many of us to this new meaning.

It takes time to understand things that have been rendered invisible by social normalization and it also takes time to process the meaning of those things, to integrate this new understanding into one’s world view. It also takes courage because this integration process inevitably challenges one’s identity. We should remember that expanding one’s world view is an ongoing, lifelong process for all of us.

One conceptual stumbling block with our new use of “privilege” is that it is often used to refer to things that should be considered basic human rights.. While the old word might signify access to country club memberships, Ivy League educations or other elite prerogatives, we are using the word for things like “being treated respectfully by the Police”, “having your voice heard in a group discussion” or “having your sexual identity respected”…. things that every human deserves and should expect to receive. This is PROFOUNDLY confusing to the uninitiated. It is particularly challenging when race is discussed outside of it’s intersection with class and the listener is a modest income, miseducated, hardworking white american (the single largest demographic in the USA) who just binged on a TV series about how Bill Cosby got away with raping countless women or a radio program detailing Barack Obama murdering innocent Muslims with drone strikes (go KPFA!!). One obvious conundrum is that while racism and white supremacy permeate American culture and are central forces in determining the trajectory of our collective and individual lives, not all white people are powerful and not all people of color are powerless. This is true of many structural social critiques, they often break down when applied to specific individuals.

Taking the concept of Privilege out of the personal realm and applying it more generally to the social structures in which we interact can help create common ground that doesn’t run roughshod over the particulars of someone’s story or hold specific individuals responsible for the actions of others and for social mechanisms beyond their control. I think the failure to do this is a recipe for communication breakdowns, non-productive conflict and hardening of ideological lines…. things we have way too much of already! Making sweeping presumptions about other people’s struggles and hardships is neither charming nor a solid strategy for eliciting open-mindedness. Lastly, any intellectually honest person can see that “privilege” is a nearly endless hierarchy. There’s almost always people above and below us on any question of privilege, the fact that you can read this being an obvious example. Acknowledging this while challenging structural inequity is a first step towards building community around language that questions the status quo and speaks to our shared desire to create a more just and equitable world for everyone.

The 2017 Slingshot organizer is now available. Selling the organizer pays for us to give the paper out for free, so if you want to support this paper please buy the organizer for yourself and as gifts. You can order the organizer on-line but if possible, please buy it from a brick and mortar store which helps support the many coops, infoshops and independent bookstores that sell the Organizer.

Slingshot is always looking for more stores and coops to carry the organizer so let us know if a local business near you would like a sample copy and ordering details. If you want to be a local distributor in your town, while your band is touring, or at your school, email us.

A smartphone organizer app is 90% finished but we still don’t have a release date.

By Wendy M.A.D.

Whether or not you believe in aliens, here’s a piece of sound advice: never trust anyone who says we can trust The Greys.

Okay, so MK Ultra happened. And sure, it’s a big deal. But do we have to brood on it forever? Don’t we have more relevant systemic stuff to think about, like, I don’t know, CAPITALISM SCRAPING THE BIOSPHERE FROM THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET?

It’s funny when I meet people who think ideas can exist separate from community. It takes a certain kind of privilege to assume that your community’s discourse is ontological fact.

Never trust anyone to help you who doesn’t have the courage to say no to your face. Such a person will politely throw you under the bus.

Finding housing in Berkeley these days is like dating, only worse. You show up at the same time as 20 other people vying for the same room, and all you can do is look your shiniest  while trying to outshine everyone else. It sucks. It’s worse than those shitty reality shows where they have all the suitors competing to marry some asshole.

Holy fuck, everyone! Do you realize how much smog is flying over our city from the ports!!? These big fucking ships sit and idle their engines all day, blowing smog all over the place!!! Why don’t they just turn their damn engines off?! Maybe if we taxed the shipping companies a one-year CEO salary for every hour they leave their boats idling like that, they’d shape up quick.

Okay, so there’s “cracking a squat” which means taking over an abandoned building, and then there’s “popping a squat” which is when a cis-lady pees in a place without plumbing. If you mix the terms up you sound like an idiot.

Bhakti is the mystical path of devotion. If life is getting you down, give it a try.

They say up in the Berkeley hills, where all the laylines meet, you’ll find a cave shaped like a great Yoni, which is to say, shaped like a Grand Cunt. If you sit inside the cave for the better part of an afternoon, your sexual hang-ups and addictions will be cured.

Okay, so fine, MK Ultra: the CIA started illegally testing “mind control drugs” on unknowing subjects. It’s all been declassified. But seriously, don’t we have more important things to worry about?!

Not that I’ve been playing sellout cellphone games or anything, but what the fuck is up with all the level ten Blue Gyms near the zen centers in Berkeley? Come on Team Valor, get your game on!

There are racist algorithms that have already taken over parts of our schools, legal system and medical system. Oh, you don’t think algorithms can be racist? Read Cathy O’Neal’s book Weapons of Math Destruction and think again!

Socrates was the Zachary Running Wolf of ancient Athens. The only real difference is Socrates didn’t have a bicycle. And Zachary Running Wolf probably wont be executed for corrupting the youth.

If you ever find yourself contemplating whether or not to pop an IPO, you’ve already failed at life.

Some people believe that MK Ultra was all about the CIA’s response to Stew Albert’s “crazy” idea to unite politics & culture and invent the hippie.  By associating this cool new group of social changers with drugs that render you inept to make social change, the CIA was able to kill the movement’s momentum. They also did the same thing to black communities, getting black folks addicted to crack cocaine. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

Okay, time to get serious. At People’s Park there are some predatory men who come round looking for women to sell. What they do is target young women of color–they push hard drugs on a girl, aiming to get her hooked on crack or heroine, and then after a few days of letting her use the stuff freely, they inform the girl she’s in debt to them for the drugs and lead her away. Once a girl has been led away like this, we don’t see her in the Park again. The police have been told about this, and totally ignore it (cuz actually helping people is apparently beyond the pigs in blue).  We gotta stand up for our sisters of color: if you see this shit going down in People’s Park, form a big group and scatter the slave-hunters off!

Also, seriously, whether or not you believe in aliens, if someone says they’re aligned with the Pleiadians, they tend to be all right.

 

By Amelia Cat Annalee Brown

For hundreds of years, cultural theorists have developed all sorts of useful terms to help us understand and communicate about the weirdness that is humans doing capitalism. One such term is “reification.” This term was developed by philosopher György Lukács in 1923 in his reading of Karl Marx’s work from the mid-1800s. The term Lukács used was the German word Verdinglichung, meaning “making into a thing.”

What is reification?

Reification is a process through which social constructs come to be mistaken for facts of nature. Through reification, “capital” comes to stand in for labor. “Gender” comes to stand in for consent to a lifelong set of social activities. “Race” is likewise used to represent a fantasy that you can instantly know which strangers to trust and which to (dis)regard as needing to be punished/ saved/ appropriated/ excluded.

Reification is a kind of collective fluency in forgetfulness. It is a way of allowing one thing to stand in for another. It is a codic language that contains within it hierarchies that presuppose “winners” and “losers.”

The following items have been reified as the fantasies “money,” “gender,” and “race”:

– paper

-a doctor’s assessment of a baby’s genitals at birth

-a split-second judgment about the amount of melatonin in a person’s skin and/or the shape of certain features limited to their face

The idea that these things are in any way intrinsically connected to the fantasies they have been reified as is absurd! Yet histories of oppression are actively held in place under the smooth surface of reified fantasies like “race” “capital” and “gender.” Also, we find ourselves forced to participate in co-creating these oppressive fantasies in order to achieve membership and recognition within the current social structure. This is because those who have learned to manipulate reified fantasies have used them build their own power, which further reinforces them.

Can we end the cycle?

We can fight back by questioning the language and practices that uphold these reified fantasies at every turn. It will be tough at first, though. Many people who have been deceived by reification will argue that the items that have been reified as part of a fantasy are the evidence for that fantasy’s existence. (Dude, don’t event try and explain the concept of “tautology” to someone like that—it is so not worth it.) Just remind them of the basic rule in logic that correlation is not causation. Just because it rained once in July doesn’t mean it always rains in July. Just because someone has a certain configuration of genitals does not mean they should be expected to listen to your problems, know how to use a hacksaw, or [insert random arbitrary life-long role here]. It is the same with variations in skin tone, economic predictions, etc. The existence of these things doesn’t prove the ontological existence of the fantasies our culture has assigned to them called “race,” “the market,” and “gender.”

Failed attempts at ending reification.

During the 20th Century, people around the world became aware that “the market” and “capital” are reified social fantasies, and that these fantasies hold oppressions in place. In response, millions attempted to re-reify “capital” as “the thing that causes all the bad things.” The result was disastrous.

Everything that’s called itself “communism” in the past is the same as “capitalism” only it is like hyper-capitalism, as it did away with the (meager) negotiations that the reified construct of capital lets stand between the worker and the extraction of their labor. In “communism,” “capital”—the reified exchange system of congealed labor—gets banned and replaced with an ideology, an ideology whose integrity is so fragile that thousands of academics had to be executed in the USSR and China to keep that ideology safe from their questioning.

The state (i.e., “capital’s other half”) does not go away with the mere banishing of the market! Re-reifying shit doesn’t do shit! All the bad things of hierarchy continued to exist, but just took on different forms. In totalitarian communism, it’s like the babysitter threw the kids off a bridge and still wants to get paid. The problem is not solved! Not solved! No! Meow!

And then there are cases like Cuba, where the state was pretty laid back. But then black markets just rose up and eventually become legal again. Still not solved!!

Simply doing away with reified things doesn’t solve the oppressions they held in place. Rather, it just shifts them around. Things get re-reified. Oppression just disguises itself using fancy new forms.

Is it possible to stop reifying things? (Spoiler Alert: No.)

It is very likely that reification is hardwired into us. Evidence shows that our species’ capacity for language and tool-making developed simultaneously in Broca’s Area of the brain (Uomini and Meyer 2013) through a gene-culture co-evolutionary dynamic (Morgan et al. 2014) over the last 2 million or so years. Perhaps in reification, this neurological ubiquity between language and tool-making creates a type of psychological optical illusion, a “toolification” of socially-reinforced fantasies that have been codified as language, creating that uncanny sense that reified things are real.

That is why things like “race,” “gender,” and “the market” often feel real, even though they are just co-created social constructs.

If you don’t believe me, talk to LARPers. They’ll tell you those foam swords take on a weird kind of reality when “game is on” and the “swords” have been temporarily reified as having a huge level of social value. This is seriously a hardwired thing!

Then how do we have our revolution?!

Perhaps it is impossible for us not to reify. Perhaps it is just part of how our nervous systems work. But we can do something revolutionary: we can become more aware of our propensity to reify. And we can use it consciously. We can create a reification system in which everyone has a level of consent to their roles. And when consent isn’t possible, at least a level of fairness.

By playing around with our propensity to reify, we can help each other get better at seeing the lines of the matrix—only this is a biologically hardwired matrix that we can’t escape, but rather must learn to co-create from within. (I hate to say it, but larping is probably the best way to do this.)

There is no meta- with reification, only para-. We can’t imagine ourselves to be separate outside observers from all this. Humans need meaning (which comes from co-creating our social reality….which is a huge part of reification) like we need food. Without meaning, we fall into the voids of addiction and depression. There is nothing revolutionary about cutting oneself off from meaning.

We need to stop using reification to fix reification. Rather, there is a type of “composting” that needs to happen. A relaxed breaking down of things.  A movement towards self-reflection.  Towards types of knowing that can be found only in leisure (Pieper 1952). Because it is through the process of building the language to lend social value to the spaces outside of what is reified that we find our power to resist and reinvent those things.

Towards widespread fluency in reification!

Games (of all things) teach us to be fluent in reification. Board games. Card games. Computer games. Just so long as we maintain our ability to pause the game and reflect on why the cards, chips, and pixels are meaningful. Something is happening inside of us that makes those game items meaningful. That is the basic mechanism that fuels reification.

By teaching kids to be literate in game mechanics—and to identify moments when reification is occurring!—they will be better able to question and understand the moments when reification creeps into society. Rather than mistaking that sense of something being real for reality, kids need to learn to laugh off the trait of reification when it emerges. The next generation should be able to say with ease: “Race/Capital/Gender/[x] is a shitty game, let’s not play that one anymore.”

Likewise, if we are to overcome reification, rote memorization must be thrown away and replaced with Experiential Learning (Kolb 1975) in the classroom. This is a type of learning where concrete experience is merged with a process of self-observation and reflection from which abstract concepts emerge, followed by a process of testing the concepts, researching, and repeating the process. This mode of education empowers people to build the cognitive tools they need to break down systems of reification in their own lives and society, while ensuring that learning remains a mode of self-empowerment, rather than other-empowerment, as happens when kids are taught to memorize rote systems without ever questioning them.

An education modality rooted in experiential learning, paired with game literacy in a culture that has reclaimed leisure—this is the greatest leap we can make towards building culture that is happier, smarter, and less likely to destroy ourselves and half our planet’s life.

The most important coming revolution will not be in the streets, but rather in/against the classroom.

 

Sources

don’t just trust us—read the original!

Lukács, György. 1923. Reification & The Consciousness of the Proletariat.

Mark, Karl. Das Capital.

Morgan, T.J.H., N.T. Uomini, et al. 2014. Experimental Evidence for the Co-Evolution of Hominin Tool-Making Teaching and Language.

Pieper, Josef. 1952. Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

Uomini, Natalie Thaïs, and Georg Friedrich Meyer. 2013. “Shared Brain Lateralization Patterns in Language and Acheulean Stone Tool Production: A Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound Study.”

By Charna Fon

There are no great revolutionaries. There are no soaring heroes whose heights we cannot ourselves attain. There is no infallible freedom fighter, no ubermensch whose perfect example we can follow and end up at collective liberation. When a revolutionary makes the right decision there is no guarantee of any particular outcome resulting, let alone the desired outcome. Sometimes intelligent decisions and effective organizing along with well-planned action bear the fruit of victory; most of the time they do not. Our victories are the products of learning from failure.

We must have a method for capturing the important lessons from our defeats. We must have the will to endlessly regroup, reorganize, and re-engage. Revolutionism is the art of perseverance and the science of historical materialism. Perseverance must be our guiding moral away from decadence and nihilism; it is not an idealist conception of a supposed predestiny to overthrow capitalism. Historical materialism must be our lens for viewing past epochs of struggle for the sake of understanding our own; it is not a predictive method in which our fate is sealed by a linear orthodoxy.

The objective economic and social conditions are not what makes revolutionary class struggle, only we ourselves can meet that task. And it is not by the virtue of any exceptional individual that such a task is met but by ongoing collective activity. When the forces at play (most of which we cannot control) are aligned in our favor we must seize the moment as it corresponds to our own available forces. Whether the decisive moment yields a success or a defeat is not determined by any individual’s maneuvers but by the totality of all of those maneuvers within the relationship of forces.

The so-called greatness of the individual revolutionary is a product only of historical discourse. The ones hailed as heroes of proletarian revolution throughout history were extremely effective political organizers who knew how to go about agitating. Yet there have been, and are, many of the like who strive earnestly toward social revolution whom history will never acknowledge as heroic or even having existed. The efforts and contributions of these countless unknown are vital to the viability of our side in the class struggle.

What is needed is a large volume of struggle, spontaneous fight back and organized resistance toward Total Liberation. Revolutionaries of the past have never created a revolutionary situation out of sheer strategic brilliance; they have acted decisively in an already in motion situation which was created through years of continuous struggle on the part of courageous people whose names and deeds we will never know. This is true of all of the biggest names in all the most esteemed revolutionary periods from Durruti to Mother Jones. This is not to say that we ought to ignore the achievements and lessons of such individuals. We ought to take them sincerely into account while refraining from emulating them. The struggles of past eras and distant places should be studied, supported, borrowed from, but never equated with what we face here and now, wherever or whenever that may be.