Comic by Priyanka Pai

Comic by Priyanka Pai

All around us, the world seems to exist in a perpetual state of cycling oppression and exploitive objectification. Our current structure of society, as well as our philosophical understanding of “civilization,” rises from the collective subconscious ocean on jerry-rigged wings of mistrust and the insecure manipulation of desires. Our American education system is a reflection of current moral values, cultivating an “efficient” work force adept at making guesses rather than informed decisions. There is an understanding that freedom is the possession of property that is held in front of the hungry eyes of the working class in order to encourage their tireless drive to find fulfillment. These people are used as chariots of the rich, constantly growing and infinitely expendable real life versions of Boxer from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, promised the world of prosperity through glimpses and propaganda fed to them through a slow drip IV. The world over, a miasma of mindlessly self-destructive self-indulgence is poisoning our air, our water, our hearts and our minds, perpetuating a perception of reality as a competitive “you or me” relation that divides the oppressed and favors those with power at the expense of the whole.

Now is the time for a rallying battle cry, a redefinition of freedom as a relationship of interconnectivity. It is not a matter of being protected from the outside world, but of intersecting in a way that maximizes the possibilities. This does not mean we have to seek consensus for its own sake; both conflict and consensus can expand and ennoble us, so long as no centralized power is able to compel agreement or transform conflict into a “winner-takes-all” competition. Rather than break the world into tiny, individualized freedoms, let’s learn to make the most of our interconnection. Let’s begin, collectively, to move away from the primal nature of our prior imperial, hegemonic globalization, or the massive expansion of a culture of hierarchical, dominance-based power structure, for such a structure demands insecurity and mistrust, utilizing a moral system of guilt and shame and resentment to divide and manipulate the people it encounters as a means of expanding profit.

We must start by encouraging the cultivation of mutualistic self-determination — or the care of other people as a means of caring for ourselves — by reconciling the individual and the whole. We must change our current socioeconomic philosophies of fracturing the individual as a means of personal self-stimulated isolation. Our culture demands a striving against one another in the name of capital and control, a struggle which results, oftentimes, in immense, oppressive social constructions that proliferate actions of prejudice and resentment.

To quote The Coming Insurrection, a manual for the initiation of the reconstruction of our understanding of society written by the communal, anonymous anarchist group The Invisible Committee, “Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations — from our selves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has decomposed at the same speed that it was becoming real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of existence, perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured away, that the possibility of communism resides. When all is said and done, it is with an entire anthropology that we are at war. With the very idea of man.”

I am aware of the caution with which the word “communism” must be used. Due to the unjust utilization of the concept of the commune by imperialistically minded, politically charged, authoritative individuals, the proprietors of our society and the perpetrators of domination have relegated the concept of a communal, mutually beneficial society, to a place in our collective vernacular of vehement disdain.

The Invisible Committee asserts, “Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of struggle.” It is our duty, as the custodians of now and all future potentials, to “redefine communism as the matrix of a meticulous, audacious assault on domination.” We must remember to remind ourselves that the utilization of communism by our enemies as a means of prior oppression does not mean that we cannot reclaim our right to coexist from their clutches. Language serves to communicate only because we hold it in common. The same goes for ideas, desires, hopes, dreams and love. Each of us is composed, orchestrated, of a chaos of contrary forces, all of which extend beyond us through time and space. In choosing which we cultivate, we determine what we intend to foster in everyone we encounter.

Despite the massive efforts by those with authority to individualize, divide and control those with power, we are not discrete, isolated entities. Our bodies are composed of thousands of different species living within us in symbiosis: rather than closed fortresses, they are ongoing processes through which nutrients and microbes ceaselessly pass. A swarming pack of wolves, a pride of lions, an evening filled with a symphony of cicadas, crickets and owls, is as individual, as unitary, as solitary, as each one of our bodies. We do not act in a vacuum, self-propelled by reason; the ties of the cosmos surge through us. The system that everyone accepts is the one that we have to live under. When people challenge this idea, however, we are presented with the chance to renegotiate our reality as well.

Nothing lasts forever. Every order, every construct, holds the conditions of the possibilities of its own destruction. Every system is haunted by all that it cannot incorporate or control, which is where the insecurity of authority develops. The Invisible Committee asserts, “It is useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for a revolution. To go on waiting is madness. We are already situated within the collapse of civilization. It is in this reality that we must choose sides.”
It is within this reality we must choose — to unite, in reclamation of our collective, communal selves. Don’t cling to this old world. To change anything, start everywhere. To change everything, start anywhere. Good luck.

Kagan Fletcher is a College freshman from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Kagan Fletcher
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