This text was written as part of the LSC Pamphlet Program. It reflects only the opinions of the author(s) and not the consensus of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

Trigger warnings: discussions of sexual assault, cruelty towards unhoused folks, and genocide

by duskfall of earth laliberté

Bafflement

It’s easy to be angry at the horrors in this world exactly because it is a reasonable response to have. Who wouldn’t be angry when you learn of the (rising) death toll in Gaza^[1]? Who wouldn’t be angry when you see (more and more) people being arrested for sleeping on sidewalks? Who wouldn’t be angry when you see a(nother) rapist and pedophile elected into office^[2]? Hierarchies of oppression are insidious and ever-present, but they do not have to be. Together, we all have the power to end travesties.

And yet some people are not angry, or don’t ever show it, and some are even glad. How is it possible? Even the richest in the world have access to the news, learning materials are freely available, and yet they don’t put a shred of their privilege to help. No anger! No outrage! It’s baffling that people don’t care about injustice when it is easier than ever to see and easier than ever to connect with others to right it. Why is this?

A few city councils in the northeast of Turtle Island on stolen Wampanoag land (known by some as “The United States”) recently passed ordinances that criminalize “unlawful camping” on public property. These laws are popping up in many places after the Supreme Court allowed such abhorrent treatment in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (28 June 2024)^[3]. That is, it criminalizes unhoused people. Just under thirty citizens of our city spoke against this ordinance, nearly one hundred supported those speaking against it, and one city councilor voted against it. Every person who spoke against the ordinance had their own reasons: some people were previously or will be imminently unhoused; some pushed for allocating funding to actually useful places; and one business owner was scared that they’ll be forced to kick people out into the deadly winter chill. Though the ordinance ended up passing, everyone speaking against it, as well as those just sitting and supporting, took their anger and channeled it into something helpful. Though the city council was never going to listen—they have business interests to serve and fears to peddle—we spoke to the people of our city and got the word out about this vile ordinance.

The three citizens who spoke in favor of criminalizing unhoused people, as well as the rest of the city council, used the framing that unhoused people are icky, dangerous, diseased, and blemishes upon beautiful property. What they miss is that unhoused people are not radioactive lawn ornaments, they are humans who are suffering some of the worst trauma that can be inflicted in this so-called society. As any person living paycheck-to-paycheck can tell you, you are never more than a handful of unfortunate coincidences away from losing your housing.

It must be asked—why can’t those councilors see how much harm they’re causing?

How can they possibly not care?

Is it a problem with empathy? Empathy is multimodal: It can be the ability to intuit another’s feelings based on perceptual clues. It can be synonymous with compassion. It can also be the ability to think through another’s material conditions and wonder how that would make oneself feel.

We ourselves don’t have that first kind of empathy, likely due to autism. When our life partner cries, we can’t intuit why. However, we can think about what conditions lead her to crying and can consider whether that would make us cry. From there we can act with compassion and help her. Any person, if they take a second to think and have a good grasp on the situation, can think through the apparent effects and piece together how they would feel if they were in those conditions. That is, Empathy can function through the veil of ignorance^[4].

So, there are at least three conditions that would make one want to help folks in harm’s way—that is, to have solidarity: proper knowledge of conditions besetting those facing harm (conscience), proper knowledge of what ways one can help (awareness of opportunities), empathy, and the capacity to help. If someone has all of those, they will help.

Conscience

Oppression is the suffering reified by hierarchical society. Knowledge of oppression is necessary to care. In the hierarchical societies that most people live in, suffering is readily apparent. For those at the bottom of hierarchies, they are likely to suffer more often and to suffer worse. For those benefiting from hierarchies, the everyday suffering of this world can affect them less often and less painfully, but even the richest of the rich are able to sometimes glimpse the low-wage worker cleaning up their messes.

Everyone can feel hierarchy. Those who have the most power over others (“power-over”) and those who feel that they deserve power believe that hierarchy—and thence, oppression—is right, inevitable, and good. These ideas, emitted in plumes by those with the most power-over, pervade the air, choking us all.

It is possible to live under a rock, but the news is freely available and is replete with stories of atrocities across the world. Those city councilors clearly have seen unhoused people and some have definitely interacted with them. Videos of Palestinians being brutally murdered en masse are common, and any person must at some level be horrified, at least at the desecrated remains of actual human people. The news is readily available to show you that the so-called “President” of some parts of Turtle Island committed statutory rape, among many, many instances of vile misogyny that any reasonable person would call rape and sexual assault, but which rapists, fascists, and those with the most power-over (but we repeat ourselves) call “slander”.

Suffering pervades this world and it is impossible to never notice it. Everyone knows that something is wrong, there must be reasons for suffering, but echo chambers, propaganda, and the lies pushed by those with the most power-over the world distort knowledge and thus prevent people from knowing about oppression.

Empathy

Humans are products of their material conditions. In general, a human’s reaction to particular conditions makes sense: It’s readily apparent that if someone is sleeping outside in the winter, hungry, alone, scared they’ll be randomly arrested, they’ll be in a pretty sour mood and may lash out. Though the mind is incredibly complex and how it functions is arcane, the mind is also a material condition that people live in and act through, albeit with reactions that may not be apparent to those outside of the mind in question. When our PTSD is triggered by something most people consider inconsequential, we may cry and run away. To someone without PTSD, crying and running away from that stimulus may seem extreme and inappropriate, but given how this trigger makes us feel (sudden fear, overwhelming anxiety, flashbacks, et cetera), this is a reasonable response.

Any person, if they have proper knowledge of a situation, can figure out why someone is acting the way they are because humans are living in and responding to material conditions. Any person can realize that if they were the sole survivor of their entire family, neighborhood, community being slaughtered by American bombs, they’d be extremely opposed to America funding the genocidal fascist settler-colonial Zionist state.

Awareness of opportunities

The proper knowledge of what ways one can help can be obscure or nonexistent. For instance, you may need to bulk order t-shirts for a company event; any t-shirts you buy are almost definitely made with slave labor. Your boss needs you to put in this order today and he can’t tolerate another delay. You fear you may be fired. What can you even do? In a world where ruthless Capitalist exploitation reigns supreme, there is often no ethical option available.

Other scenarios are more assailable than toppling the whole of Capitalism. In practical terms, you could: show up to a city council meeting and protest, unionize your workplace^[5], volunteer at a Food Not Bombs^[6], or simply donate some money to help Palestinians^[7]. The YouTube channel “Anark” has a good video on how to start organizing if there’s nothing around you^[8].

Solidarity

Elected representatives will always be in favor of continuing the state—power structures of the state, combined with every other hierarchy (the kyriarchy^[9]), have a vested interest in perpetuating itself. The state is, and always has been, counterrevolutionary because of this undying self-interest in perpetuation.

Those who enact law to arrest unhoused folks for the crime of being poor in public, those who work for Raytheon, those who rape, must be missing any shred of conscience. Information on the oppression and suffering in this world is plentiful. The kyriarchy and the distorted knowledge that pervade this world prevent those most benefiting from hierarchy to know what is the real problem, but anyone can and ought to care, if only because with too much bad luck they’ll be the one with the boot to their neck. The solution to combat this knowledge falsely so called is to generate horizontal power. That is: We must generate the power to effect change via community, with reciprocal support, without hierarchy, by engaging in mutual aid that betters the lives of all people, allows them to truly effect change, and truly decide what is best for them and others simultaneously.

To be healthy, anger must have at least two components: that burning you feel inside you, the way it makes you tremble in what could be fear, could be terror; and knowledge and direction of where and how to channel it. Healthy anger is thus formed of rage and hope. There are many causes to care about, and many ways to help. You may not have the power to smash the kyriarchy single-handedly, but you do have the power to build a better future.

It is not only unreasonable to perpetuate oppression, it is wrong and clearly so. It is not only reasonable to be rageful at injustice, it is right. The kyriarchy is insidious—it is not only good and just to combat it, it is good and just to struggle against it to allow every single human being the power to decide their own life through freedom, solidarity, and equity.

“Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.” — Errico Malatesta^[10]

For those comrades interested in joining the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (DSA-only), or the broader Horizon Federation (no DSA membership required), join today!

References

Anark. Anarchism vs The Mega-Machine (A Modern Anarchism Part 1), 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCgr2g0cQ5Y&t=1401s.

———. The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Organizing, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU0DfVvsV5Q.

Baryon, Daniel. “Kyriarchal Power.” In A Modern Anarchism, 2022. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-a-modern-anarchism#toc4.

BuildPalestine. “Trusted Organizations to Donate to Palestine,” May 15, 2021. https://buildpalestine.com/2021/05/15/trusted-organizations-to-donate-to-palestine/.

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, No. 23-175 (Supreme Court of the United States June 28, 2024).

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Transforming Vision. 1517 Media, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22nm87s.

Food Not Bombs. “2024 Food Not Bombs Locations.” Accessed November 25, 2024. http://foodnotbombs.net/info/locations/.

Gallagher, Collin. “Lowell Says: Sleep, Starve and Suffer Elsewhere.” The UMass Lowell Connector, November 26, 2024. https://umlconnector.com/2024/11/lowell-says-sleep-starve-and-suffer-elsewhere/.

Golden Jr., Thomas A., and Shawn Machado. Unlawful Camping on Public Property, The Code of Ordinances City of Lowell, Massachusetts § 222.22 (n.d.). https://www.lowellma.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/29477?fileID=59581.

IWW. “Industrial Workers of the World.” Accessed November 25, 2024. https://www.iww.org/.

Khatib, Rasha, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf. “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential.” The Lancet 404, no. 10449 (July 20, 2024): 237–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01169-3.

Malatesta, Errico. “Toward Anarchy.” In The Method of Freedom : An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato, translated by Paul Sharkey, 27–31. 1899. Reprint, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-toward-anarchy.

Sidhwa, Feroze. “Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris.” Gaza Healthcare Letters, October 2, 2024. https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024.

Wikipedia contributors. “Original Position.” In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, November 15, 2024. Page Version ID: 1257510499. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Original_position&oldid=1257510499.