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This requires some space and nuance to speak to clearly, so I hope you read the rest of this thread when I say:
Liberation for all ultimately means liberation for our enemies, too.
Liberation for all ultimately means liberation for our enemies, too.
Many people understand the struggle as being conditioned by this premise:
The rich and powerful have the good things in life, which they deny to the rest of us.
This is a false premise. Let me tell you why.
The rich and powerful have the good things in life, which they deny to the rest of us.
This is a false premise. Let me tell you why.
The rich and powerful have *wealth*, and to have that wealth they deny it to the rest of us. We can’t meaningfully engage in our struggle if we concede that their wealth is equivalent to the good things in life. To do so concedes that the lives the powerful live are desirable.
To be rich, which is, at the end of the day, to be powerful, is not a life anyone should desire. The more power one amasses, the more of one’s own humanity has to be cut away to accommodate that power.
Aíme Césaire once wrote in his essay Discourse on Colonialism: “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”
To be a boss, a landlord, a politician, a police officer, you have to personally justify exploiting other people for your own gains. Sometimes people are born into wealth and power and are handed a scaffolding of justifications by their parents. Others build it piece by piece.
I, for one, refuse to believe that that life is a good or desirable one. A life built upon the suffering of others is an ugly, vile life. When I think of those who live it, I think of Dorian Grey, who locked away the true reality of his life of violence, even from himself.
What, then, do we mean by liberating our enemies? It is simply the logical conclusion of our assertions that the violence in our world is the result of structures, not individual people. If our aim is to bring the structures down, our aim is to free *everyone* from them.
Will there necessarily be accountability for all complicit in upholding those structures? Yes, absolutely. But ALL of us are complicit in those structures. My whiteness makes me born complicit, and I also have the responsibility of being accountable to that complicity.
But accountability, hard though it may seem for us so immeshed carceral logics, is not a punishment. It is not a guillotine. It is, in fact, a path back into community. It’s a compassionate open door, that requires only that we be brave enough to walk through it.
In a revolutionary world, there will likely be many powerful people who refuse to walk through that door. They would rather cling to their scaffolding that allowed them to feel that their power was justified rather than face the true and horrific reality of their violence.
To them, we may have no other choice but to respond with violence to ensure its end. But, if we’re serious about fighting for a better world then we *will* offer liberation to them, too. That’s what liberation ultimately is, my friends. It’s an open hand. It is a different world.
This all, by the way, is not to be used to excuse or in any way diminish the responsibility the most active perpetrators of harm have in the current system. There are aspects of birth and life that we cannot control, but to take and keep power IS an active choice.
The accountability costs for those choices would certainly be steep ones, and I won’t shed a tear or lose any sleep for the powerful who lose their lives because of those choices. This is all to say that, though they have much more freedom than most, they have no liberation.
Liberation is freedom from violence, both as perpetrator and victim. It’s freedom from alienation. It’s in mutual connection to community and the earth. The powerful do not have liberation, and our revolution will offer it to them if they are willing to accept it’s costs.
