Third World Historical: “We had developed out of the struggle” - Visions of a New Humanity in "Lessons from the Damned"
Anuja Bose
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
The most radical critiques of capitalism cannot just be economic, but must also be political. Critique must take on exploitation and domination as joint processes of oppression and disempowerment. Critique must unmask ideological systems that distort and justify capitalist exploitation and domination as rational and necessary. Critique must historicize the ways in which authoritarian modes of rule become re-situated under the capitalist mode of economic production in modernity. Critique must expose how racism and patriarchy prepare the grounds for capitalist growth and reproduction and yet demonstrate that anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles only alleviate some of the injuries of a capitalist society. These traditions of critique on the Left are encapsulated in this little book Lessons from the Damned (1973), written by an anonymous group of poor Black women, men, and children. In an effort to come to grips with their condition as poor Black people in the United States, the writers capture the thrust of centuries of critique on the Left, all the while writing a book of praxis that confronts the contradictions of being a racialized subject in a patriarchal, capitalist society fuelled by imperialist extraction. Together, they work to examine and be transformed by the contradictions of their position through self-organized spaces of collective study. To borrow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s words, this is fugitive planning and Black study in its most supreme expression.
The anonymity of the writers of Lessons from the Damned is an astute tactic. The writers do not want their lessons to be lost on readers who are conditioned to think in individual terms, who are compelled to search for singularity and distinction in the author, and who have little ability to think about poverty outside of triumphant narratives of perseverance, grit, and accomplishment. In an effort to unsettle and undo layers of ideological conditioning, the writers guide us away from the traps of individualistic thinking, and train our attention on the collective subject of the “damned.” They force us to think about the power of poor people to constitute their common world as a joint process. The dynamics of political action among the Black poor constitute a push-and-pull motion, through counterbalancing movements of passivity and passion, inactivity and activity, acceptance and resistance. As they write, “Passivity is the smothering of suffering and passion is the explosion of suffering. Passivity and passion—the ways to keep living when you’re damned, even by your own people.”(P. 153) There are no tales of ascendence, of aspiration, of striving “to be somebody” here. The reader is best to abandon those desires and be prepared for narratives of rest, passivity, passion, survival, struggle, failure, and sometimes the joy of collective study, insight, and transformation.
Cover used for Lessons from the Damned
The transitory moments of insight come when some fundamental questions are collectively tackled: What would it mean for poor Black people not to aspire to the desires of capitalist society? What would it mean to strive for anti-authoritarian ways of relating to one another? What would it mean to be deeply anti-fascist? These are the questions this small book tackles, as lessons. These are questions that are off the table today. We skirt around the issues, and address fascism only in its most obvious manifestation in the state, its institutions, and the broader political culture. But what would it mean to confront fascism in a deeper, more micropolitical way? What would it mean to confront the source of fascism in the private sphere, in the family, in schools?
Forming the backbone of the book are narratives written by children as young as twelve years of age, and they boldly take up questions of rule, authority, and domination in the family and other institutions where children are warehoused for care-taking. They question the source of authority and power exercised over them by parents, teachers, and social workers, and in turn they affirm their own potential and power as “the future peaceful people of the world” (P. 122) to set in motion anti-authoritarian modes of relating.
Anti-fascism is at the core of the lessons articulated in this book. Anti-fascist political practices, attitudes, and orientations are cultivated inside the families of poor people—not on the streets, but rather inside “kitchens and living rooms”; not in schools and factories, but rather in playgrounds, parks, and “even the beach.” (P.191) These are the spaces of domesticity and leisure that the revolutionary teachers of poor people embrace as the new setting for an anti-fascist education. The anti-fascist message of the book is expressed most clearly by the voices of the poor Black children who write it. They attest, “Fascism was no big, frightening issue for us. It was our daily life. The fascism of our parents, and our brothers and sisters, forced them to beat the hell out of us, put us out, deny us food and clothing.” (P.244) The children affirm that the personal is political by pointing to the ways in which relations of care, nourishment, and security in the private sphere are suffused by hierarchy, authority, and domination.
To begin social struggle as political education in the private sphere, in the spaces of everyday life, means to confront the dual challenges of addressing the cooperation and complicity of the damned in perpetuating their own oppression. To take up the feminist maxim “the personal is political” means asking the associated question, “Why have we loved our own chains?” This is the question that organizes almost every chapter of this book. The core lessons reveal how the fear of force and respect for authority are learned in the family, at church, and at school, and solicit the cooperation of the oppressed for their continuation, reinforcement, and preservation. To drive home the message that the damned must take responsibility and stop cooperating in their own oppression, the teachers ask: “Now do you see how we are used, and do you understand who uses us, and do you see how we let ourselves be used? It takes two.” (P. 70)
The lesson of cooperation is coupled throughout by the lesson of complicity. To get to the heart of the lesson of complicity, the teachers insist that their students consider the place of Black Americans in the extension of U.S. imperialism abroad. By taking up this question from the private sphere of domesticity and comfort, the teachers draw attention to how poor and middle-class Black Americans benefit from the “trickle down loot,” “the crumbs of the white ruling class” made possible from imperial plunder in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. (P.32) Complicity is articulated not only through the indirect benefits of empire but also through active participation in upholding empire: “Many of us black men and our fathers went to war to support this plunder. Many of us black women supported and encouraged our lovers and sons to go. So we need to go beyond racism to a deeper reality.” (P.33) In short, there are no neat and easy narratives of racial oppression and solidarity in the Lessons from the Damned, only the articulation of a complex web of complicity that the authors urge Black Americans to confront candidly by virtue of their living in the “belly of the monster.” (P.33)
The belly of the monster is the powerful site of struggle, a crucial weak link in a global system of oppression and exploitation. This is the site where the poor Black people who have come together to author this book have decided to erect a system of the “undercommons”—spaces of study, reflection, and unlearning in which they seek to envision a new humanity, where they seek not to be masters, but to enable mutual flourishing. This vision of a new humanity is articulated in struggle with oneself, with one’s family and friends, with one’s nation, with one’s employer, with one’s teacher, with one’s church, and with one’s racial, gender, and class affiliations. As the authors affirm, “We had developed out of the struggle in our community.” (P.28)
Anuja Bose is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on questions of solidarity; economic and political self-determination; social and economic rights; popular sovereignty; and the relationship be- tween state and civil society. Her article, “Frantz Fanon and the Politicization of the Third World as a Collective Subject,” was published in Interventions.