When You Suffer for Your Sanity and Struggle to Get Free

by Vijay Prashad / September 26th, 2024

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.

In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère is the monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh had been confined four decades earlier (1889–1890) and where he completed around 150 paintings, including several important works (among them The Starry Night, 1889).

Ex OPG, Naples (Italy), 2024.

I was thinking about both Fraisse and Van Gogh when I visited the old Ospedale Psichiatrico Giudiziario (OPG) in Naples (Italy) in September for a festival that took place in this former criminal asylum, which once held those who had committed serious offences and were deemed to be insane. The vast building, which sits in the heart of Naples on the Monte di Sant’Eframo, was first a monastery (1573–1859), then a military barrack for the Savoy regime during Italy’s unification in 1861, and then a prison set up by the fascist regime in the 1920s. The prison was closed in 2008, and then, in 2015, occupied by a group of people who would later form the political organisation Potere al Popolo! (Power to the People!). They renamed the building Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo, ‘ex’ meaning that the building is no longer an asylum, and Je so’ pazzo referring to the favourite song of the beloved local singer Pino Daniele (1955–2015), who died around the time the building was occupied:

I’m crazy. I’m crazy.
The people are waiting for me.
….
I want to live at least one day as a lion.
Je so’pazzo, je so’ pazzo.
C’ho il popolo che mi aspetta.
….
Nella vita voglio vivere almeno un giorno da leone.

Today, the Ex OPG is home to legal and medical clinics, a gym, a theatre, and a bar. It is a place of reflection, a people’s centre that is designed to build community and confront the loneliness and precarity of capitalism. It is a rare kind of institution in our world, one in which an exhausted society is increasingly isolated and individuals, encaged in a prison house of frustrated aspirations, nonetheless hope to use their meagre tools (a spoon, the handle of a chamber pot) to carve out their dreams and to reach for the starry sky.

Anita Rée (Germany), Self-Portrait, 1930.
Rée (1885–1933) killed herself after the Nazis declared her work to be ‘degenerate’.

Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not have sufficient data on mental health, largely because the poorer nations are unable to maintain an accurate account of their populations’ immense psychological struggles. As a result, the focus is often limited to the more affluent countries, where such data is collected by governments and where there is greater access to psychiatric care and medications. A recent survey of thirty-one countries (mostly in Europe and North America, but also including some poorer nations such as Brazil, India, and South Africa) shows a shifting attitude and increased concern about mental health. The survey found that 45% of those polled selected mental health as ‘the biggest health problems facing people in [their] country today’, a significant increase from the previous poll, conducted in 2018, in which the figure was 27%. Third in the list of health challenges is stress, with 31% selecting it as the leading cause of concern. There is a significant gender gap in attitudes towards mental health amongst young people, with 55% of young women selecting it as one of their primary health concerns, compared to 37% of young men (reflecting the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by mental health issues).

While it is true that the COVID-19 pandemic heightened mental health problems across the world, this crisis predated the coronavirus. Information from the Global Health Data Exchange shows that in 2019 – before the pandemic – one in eight, or 970 million, people from around the world had a mental disorder, with 301 million struggling with anxiety and 280 million with depression. These numbers should be seen as an estimate, a minimum picture of the severe crisis of unhappiness and maladjustment to the current social order.

There are range of ailments that go under the name of ‘mental disorder’, from schizophrenia to forms of depression that can result in suicidal ideation. According to the WHO’s 2022 report, one in 200 adults struggle with schizophrenia, which on average results in a ten- to twenty-year reduction in life expectancy. Meanwhile, suicide, the leading cause of death amongst young people globally, is responsible for one in every 100 deaths (bear in mind that only one in every twenty attempts results in a death). We can make new tables, revise our calculations, and write longer reports, but none of this can assuage the profound social neglect that pervades our world.

Adolf Wölfli (Switzerland), General View of the Island Neveranger, 1911.
Wölfli (1864–1930) was abused as a child, sold as an indentured labourer, and then interned in the Waldau Clinic in Bern, where he painted for the rest of his life.

Neglect is not even the correct word. The prevailing attitude to mental disorders is to treat them as biological problems that merely require individualised pharmaceutical care. Even if we were to accept this limited conceptual framework, it still requires governments to support the training of psychiatrists, make medications affordable and accessible for the population, and incorporate mental health treatment into the wider health care system. However, in 2022, the WHO found that, on average, countries spend only 2% of their health care budgets on mental health. The organisation also found that half of the world’s population – mostly in the poorer nations – lives in circumstances where there is one psychiatrist to serve 200,000 or more people. This is the state of affairs as we witness a general decline of health care budgets and of public education about the need for a generous attitude toward mental health problems. The most recent WHO data (December 2023), which covers the spike in pandemic-related health spending, shows that, in 2021, health care spending in most countries was less than 5% of Gross Domestic Product. Meanwhile, in its 2024 report A World of Debt, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows that almost a hundred countries spent more to service their debts than on healthcare. Though these are foreboding statistics, they do not get at the heart of the problem.

Over the course of the past century, the response to mental health disorders has been overwhelmingly individualised, with treatments ranging from various forms of therapy to the prescription of different medications. Part of the failure to deal with the range of mental health crises – from depression to schizophrenia – has been the refusal to accept that these problems are not only influenced by biological factors but can be – and often are – created and exacerbated by social structures. Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, one of the founders of the Critical Psychiatry Network, writes that ‘none of the situations we call mental disorders have been convincingly shown to arise from a biological disease’, or more precisely, ‘from a specific dysfunction of physiological or biochemical processes’. This is not to say that biology does not play a role, but simply that it is not the only factor that should shape our understanding of such disorders.

In his widely read classic The Sane Society (1955), Erich Fromm (1900–1980) built on the insights of Karl Marx to develop a precise reading of the psychological landscape in a capitalist system. His insights are worth re-considering (forgive Fromm’s use of the masculine use of the word ‘man’ and of the pronoun ‘his’ to refer to all of humanity):

Whether or not the individual is healthy is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility, distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton. Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact, most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.

Kawanabe Kyōsai (Japan), Famous Mirrors: The Spirit of Japan, 1874.
Kyōsai (1831–1889) was shocked, at the age of nine, when he picked up a corpse and its head fell off. This marked his consciousness and his later break with ukiyo-e traditional painting to inaugurate what is now known as manga.

The antidote to many of our mental health crises must come from re-building society and forming a culture of community rather than a culture of antagonism and toxicity. Imagine if we built cities with more community centres, more places such as Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo in Naples, more places for young people to gather and build social connections and their personalities and confidence. Imagine if we spent more of our resources to teach people to play music and to organise sports games, to read and write poetry, and to organise socially productive activities in our neighbourhoods. These community centres could house medical clinics, youth programmes, social workers, and therapists. Imagine the festivals that such centres could produce, the music and joy, the dynamism of events such Red Books Day. Imagine the activities – the painting of murals, neighbourhood clean-ups, and planting of gardens – that could emerge as these centres incubate conversations about what kind of world people want to build. In fact, we do not need to imagine any of this: it is already with us in small gestures, whether in Naples or in Delhi, in Johannesburg or in Santiago.

‘Depression is boring, I think’, wrote the poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974). ‘I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave’. So let’s make soup in a community centre, pick up guitars and drumsticks, and dance and dance and dance till that great feeling comes upon everyone to join in healing our broken humanity.FacebookTwitterReddit

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, andThe Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.

 

From Karl Marx to Eco-Marxism

By Michael Löwy

Published 20 August, 2024

Links | International Journal of Socialist Renewal

First published at New Politics.

Reflection on Marx’s contribution to an ecological perspective has made considerable progress in recent decades. The somewhat caricatured image of a “Promethean” Marx, productivist and indifferent to environmental issues, conveyed by certain ecologists in a hurry to “replace the red paradigm with the green,” has lost much of its credibility. The pioneer in the rediscovery of the ecological dimension in Marx and Engels was undoubtedly John Bellamy Foster, with his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000), which highlights Marx’s analysis of the “metabolic breakdown” (Riss des Stoffwechsels) between human societies and the natural environment, brought about by capitalism. Bellamy Foster transformed Monthly Review, one of the most important publications of the North American left, into an eco-Marxist journal, and gave rise to a whole school of Marxist thought around the theme of the metabolic rift. The school includes such important authors as Brett Clark, Ian Angus, Paul Burkett, Richard York, and many others. Bellamy Foster can be criticized for his reading of Marx as a committed ecologist, from his early writings to his later works, without taking into account texts or passages that follow a productivist logic; but the importance, novelty, and depth of his writings cannot be questioned. In reading Marx from an ecological perspective, there is a before and an after to Bellamy Foster.

Close to this school of thought — the young Japanese scholar Kohei Saito’s first book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017) distinguished himself with a more nuanced interpretation of Marx’s writings. In his latest book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Saito develops and extends his analysis of Marx’s writings, criticizing the productivism of the Grundrisse and Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), writings often regarded as the definitive formulation of historical materialism. In the 1859 Preface, Marx sees the productive forces as the main driving force of history, which, thanks to revolution, would be freed from the “fetters” of capitalist relations of production. Saito shows how, from 1870 onwards, in his writings on Russia and in his ethnographic or naturalist notebooks, Marx moved away from this vision of history. According to Saito, in this “last Marx,” a new conception of historical materialism is emerging — albeit unfinished — in which the natural environment and pre-modern (or non-European) communities play an essential role. Saito also attempts to show, notably on the basis of the Notebooks recently published by the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Marx’s adherence to the idea of degrowth, but this hypothesis does not find an effective foundation in these writings.

It seems to me that the question of Marx’s contribution to ecosocialism, or, if you like, to eco-Marxism, is not limited to his texts on the relationship with nature — which admittedly remain relatively marginal in his work: there is not a single book, or article, or chapter of a book, by Marx or Engels, dedicated to ecology, or to the ecological crisis. This is quite understandable, considering that capitalist destruction of the environment was only in its infancy and was not at all as serious as it is today. I think there are arguments in his writings that are not about nature, but are nevertheless essential contributions to an eco-Marxist reflection, provided they are rethought in the light of the ecological crisis of our time. Two elements need to be taken into account here: (1) Marx’s critique of capitalist hubris: unlimited accumulation/expansion; (2) communism as the “Kingdom of Freedom.”

1. Capitalism is a system that cannot exist without an unlimited expansive tendency. In the Grundrisse Marx observes:

Capital, in so far as it represents the universal form of wealth — money — is the tendency without limits or measure to exceed its own limit. Any limit can only be limited for it. Otherwise, it would cease to be capital: money in so far as it produces itself.[…] It is the perpetual movement that tends always to create more.1

This is an analysis that will be developed in the first volume of Capital. According to Marx, the capitalist is an individual who functions only as “personified capital.” As such, the capitalist is necessarily a “fanatical agent of accumulation,” who “forces men, without mercy or respite, to produce for the sake of producing.” This behavior is “the effect of a social mechanism of which he is only a cog.” So what is this “social mechanism” whose psychic expression in the capitalist is “the most sordid avarice and the most petty calculating spirit”? Here is its dynamic, according to Marx:

The development of capitalist production requires a continuous enlargement of the capital placed in an enterprise, and competition imposes the immanent laws of capitalist production as external coercive laws on each individual capitalist. It does not allow him to keep his capital without increasing it, and he cannot continue to increase it unless he accumulates it progressively.2

The unlimited accumulation of capital is therefore the inflexible rule of the capitalist social mechanism: “Accumulate, accumulate! That’s the law and the prophets![…] Accumulate in order to accumulate, produce in order to produce, that is the watchword of political economy, proclaiming the historical mission of the bourgeois period.”3

Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake, without rest or mercy, without limits or measure, in a perpetual movement of growth, a continuous enlargement: this, according to Marx, is the implacable logic of capital, the social mechanism of which capitalists are nothing but “fanatical agents.” The imperative of accumulation becomes a kind of secular religion, a “fanatical” cult that replaces the “law and prophets” of Judeo-Christianity.

The significance of this diagnosis for the Anthropocene of the twenty-first century is obvious: this productivist logic of capitalism, this hubris that demands permanent expansion and refuses all limits, is responsible for the ecological crisis and the catastrophic process of climate change of our time. Marx’s analysis helps us to understand why “green capitalism” is nothing but an illusion: the system cannot exist without accumulation and growth, a growth “without limits or measure,” 80 percent of which depends on fossil fuels. This is why, despite the soothing declarations of governments and international climate meetings (the Conference of the Parties) on the “ecological transition,” greenhouse gas emissions have not stopped growing. Scientists are sounding the alarm and stressing the urgent need to halt all new exploitation of fossil fuels, pending a rapid reduction in the use of existing sources; yet the major oil monopolies are opening new wells every day, and their representative, OPEC, is publicly announcing that they will have to exploit these resources for a long time to come, “to satisfy growing demand.” The same applies to new coal mines, which are constantly being opened, from “green” Germany to “socialist” China.

The fact is that demand for energy is only growing, and so is the consumption of fossil fuels, with renewables simply adding to them rather than replacing them. “Green” capitalists who want to do things differently will be squeezed out of the market: for as Marx reminds us, “competition imposes the immanent laws of capitalist production as coercive laws external to each individual capitalist.”

In 2023, the average temperature of the planet became dangerously close to the limit of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels — a limit beyond which an uncontrollable process of global warming is likely to be triggered, with increasingly intense feedback mechanisms. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists stress the need for immediate emissions reductions, with the years between now and 2030 being the last chance to avoid catastrophe. Yet the European Union and other governments are solemnly announcing that they will be able to achieve “net zero” emissions…by 2050. This announcement is doubly mystifying, not only because it pretends to ignore the urgency of the crisis, but also because “zero net” is far from being identical with zero emissions: thanks to “offset mechanisms,” companies can continue to emit if they “offset” them by protecting a forest in Indonesia.

Modern industrial capitalism has been totally dependent on coal and oil for three centuries and shows no inclination to do without them. To do this, it would have been necessary to break with accumulation “without limits or measure,” and with productivism, by organizing a process of planned degrowth, with the elimination or reduction of entire sectors of the economy: an approach totally contradictory to the very foundations of capitalism. Greta Thunberg rightly points out that it is “mathematically impossible to solve the climate crisis within the framework of the existing economic system.” This impossibility is explained by Marx’s analysis in Capital of the inexorable mechanics of capitalist accumulation and expansion.

Many ecologists blame consumption for the environmental crisis. Admittedly, the consumption model of modern capitalism is clearly unsustainable. But the source of the problem lies in the production system. Productivism is the driving force behind consumerism. Marx had already observed this dynamic. In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), he observed:

Hence production produces consumption: (1) by providing the material of consumption; (2) by determining the mode of consumption; (3) by creating in the consumer a need for the objects which it first presents as products. It therefore produces the object of consumption, the mode of consumption and the urge to consume. Similarly, consumption produces the predisposition of the producer by positing him as a purposive requirement.4

This is much truer in our time than it was in the nineteenth century. Capitalist producers create the “impulse to consume” by means of a vast, immense advertising apparatus that hammers home, day and night, on city walls, in newspapers, on radio or television, everywhere, “without truce or mercy,” the imperative need to consume this or that commodity. Commercial advertising takes over every area of life: sport, religion, politics, culture, information. Artificial needs are created, “fashions” manufactured, and the system induces a frenzy of consumption, “without limits or measure,” of products that are less and less useful, which allows production to expand, to extend to infinity. If, as Marx observed, it is production that produces consumption, then it is the productive system that needs to be transformed, rather than preaching abstinence to consumers. The pure and simple abolition of commercial advertising is the first step toward overcoming consumer alienation and enabling individuals to rediscover their true needs.

Another dimension of capitalist consumerism Marx criticized—a dimension with obvious current ecological implications—is the predominance of having over being, of the possession of goods, or money, or capital, over free human activity. This theme is developed in the 1844 Manuscripts. According to Marx, bourgeois society is dominated exclusively by “the sense of possession, of having.” In place of the life of human beings appears “the life of property” and “in place of all the physical and intellectual senses has appeared the simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of having.” Possession, having, is alienated life: “The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”5

This is another form of consumerism: the important thing here is not use, but the possession of a good, a commodity. Its most obvious manifestation is the conspicuous consumption of the privileged classes, which Thorstein Veblen studied in his classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Today it has reached monumental proportions, fueling a vast industry of luxury goods: private jets, yachts, jewelry, works of art, perfumes. But the obsession with possessions is also spreading to other social classes, leading to the accumulation of goods as an end in themselves, regardless of their use value. Being, human activity as such, is sacrificed to having, the possession of goods, feeding productivism, the flooding of social life with a growing mass of products that are less and less useful. Of course, the resources needed to produce this mountain of commodities are still, and increasingly, coal and oil.…

2. Communism as the “Kingdom of Freedom” is founded on the priority of being over having, by reversing the alienated logic imposed by capitalism. Bourgeois political economy pushes this perverse logic to its ultimate consequences: “Self-denial, the renunciation of life and all human needs is its main thesis. The less you eat, drink, buy books, the less you go to the theatre, the ball, the cabaret, the less you think, love, theorize, the less you sing, talk, fence, etc., the more you save, the more you increase your treasure […] your capital […] all that the economist takes from you of life and humanity, he replaces with money and wealth.[…]”6

Marx included in what constitutes being—that is, human life and humanity—three constituent elements: (1) The satisfaction of essential needs (drinking, eating); (2) The satisfaction of cultural needs: going to the theater, cabaret, buying books. It should be noted that these two categories involve acts of vital consumption, but not the accumulation of goods (at most books!) and even less the accumulation of money. The inclusion of cultural needs is already an implicit protest against capitalism, which wants to limit the worker’s consumption to what is necessary for basic survival: food and drink. For Marx, the worker, like all human beings, needs to go to the theater and the cabaret, to read books, to educate himself, to amuse himself; (3) Human self-activity: thinking, loving, theorizing, singing, speaking, fencing, and so on. This list is fascinating for its diversity, its serious yet playful nature, and for the fact that it includes both the essentials—thinking, loving, speaking—and the “luxuries”: singing, theorizing, fencing, etc. What all these examples have in common is their active nature: the individual is no longer a consumer, but an actor. Of course, we could add many other examples of human self-activity, individual or collective, artistic or sporting, playful or political, erotic or cultural, but the examples Marx chose open a wide window on the “reign of freedom.” Of course, the distinction between these three moments is not absolute: eating and reading books are also activities. They are three manifestations of life — being — in the face of what lies at the heart of bourgeois society: having, property, and accumulation.

Choosing to be rather than to have is therefore a significant contribution by Marx to a socialist/ecological culture, to an ethic and an anthropology at odds with the fundamental data of modern capitalist civilization, where the absolute predominance of having, in its commodity form, is leading, with increasing frenzy, to the destruction of the planet’s ecological balance.

Important reflections — directly inspired by the 1844 Manuscripts — on the opposition between being and having can be found in the Freudo-Marxist writings of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. A German Jewish anti-fascist who emigrated to the USA, Fromm published his book Avoir ou être (To Have or To Be) in 1976. A choice on which man’s future depends, which compares two opposing forms of social existence: the having mode and the being mode. In the first, my property constitutes my identity: both subject and object are reified (commodified). You feel yourself to be a commodity, and the “it” owns the “me.” Possessive greed is the dominant passion. But, Fromm insists, greed, unlike hunger, has no point of satiation; its satisfaction does not fill the inner void.…

So what is the mode of being? Fromm quotes a passage from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts: “Let us start from the idea that the human being is a human being and that his relation to the world is a human relation. Love, then, can only be exchanged for love, trust only for trust.”

The being mode, Fromm explains, is an active mode, wherein human beings express their faculties, their talents, the richness of their gifts; to be active here means “to renew oneself, to develop oneself, to overflow, to love, to transcend the prison of the isolated self; it is to be interested, attentive; it is to give.” The mode of being is socialism, not in its social democratic or Soviet (Stalinist) version, reduced to an aspiration for maximum consumption, but according to Marx: human self-activity. In short, concludes Fromm, quoting Marx again in the third volume of Capital, socialism is the kingdom of freedom, whose goal is “the development of human power as an end in itself.”

Karl Marx rarely wrote about the emancipated society of the future. He took a close interest in utopias, but was wary of versions that were too prescriptive, too restrictive, in short, dogmatic; his objective was, as Miguel Abensour so aptly reminds us, the transcendence of utopia to critical communism. What does this consist of? In the third volume of Capital — an unfinished manuscript edited by Friedrich Engels — we find an essential passage, often quoted but rarely analyzed. The word “communism” does not appear, but it does refer to the classless society of the future, which Marx defines, and this is a highly significant choice, as the “Kingdom of Freedom” (Das Reich der Freiheit):

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.7

The context in which this passage appears is interesting. It concerns a discussion on the productivity of labor. The author of Capital suggests that increasing productivity not only makes it possible to increase the wealth produced, but above all to reduce working hours. This would seem to take precedence over an unlimited extension of the production of goods.

Marx thus distinguishes two areas of social life: the “reign of necessity” and the “reign of freedom,” each with its own form of freedom. Let’s start by taking a closer look at the first: the reign of necessity, which corresponds to the “sphere of material production” and therefore of labor “determined by need and external ends.” Freedom also exists in this sphere, but it is a limited freedom, within the constraints imposed by necessity: it is the democratic, collective control of “socialized” human beings over their material exchanges — their metabolism — with nature. In other words, what Marx is talking about here is democratic planning, in other words, the essential proposition of the socialist economic program: freedom here means emancipation from the blind power of economic forces — the capitalist market, the accumulation of capital, the fetishism of the commodity.

Let’s go back to the passage above from the third volume of Capital: it’s interesting to note that this text doesn’t talk about the “domination” of human society over nature, but about the collective control of exchanges with nature: this was to become, a century later, one of the founding principles of ecosocialism. Work remains an activity imposed by necessity, with a view to satisfying the material needs of society; but it will cease to be alienated work, unworthy of human nature.

The second form of freedom, the most radical, the most integral, the one that corresponds to the “Kingdom of Freedom,” lies beyond the sphere of material production and necessary work. However, there is an essential dialectical relationship between the two forms of freedom: it is through democratic planning of the economy as a whole that priority can be given to free time; conversely, the maximum extension of free time will enable workers to participate actively in political life and in self-management, not only of companies but of all economic and social activity, at the level of neighborhoods, towns, regions, and countries. Communism cannot exist without the participation of the whole population in the process of discussion and democratic decision-making, not, as today, by a vote every four or five years, but on a permanent basis—which does not prevent the delegation of powers. Thanks to free time, individuals will be able to take in hand the management of their collective life, which will no longer be left in the hands of professional politicians.

What Marx adds in the third volume of Capital to his 1844 argument is the fact that human self-activity — the third moment discussed in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts — requires, in order to flourish, free time, time obtained by reducing the hours of “necessary” work. This reduction is the key that opens the door to the “Kingdom of Freedom,” which is also the “Kingdom of Being.” Thanks to this time of freedom, human beings will be able to develop their intellectual, artistic, erotic, and playful potential. This is the opposite of the capitalist universe of the infinite accumulation of increasingly useless goods, of productivist and consumerist “expansion” without limits or measure.

Conclusion: beyond his writings that refer directly to nature and to its destruction by capitalist “progress,” Marx’s work contains reflections that have, at the deepest level, an ecological significance, through their critique of capitalist productivism and their imagination of a society in which free human activity is at the center of social life, and not the obsessive accumulation of “goods.” These are essential points of reference for the development of a twenty-first-century eco-Marxism.

• 1

  Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Random House/Vintage, 1973).

• 2

  Karl Marx, Capital(International Publishers, 1968), vol. 1.

• 3

  Ibid.

• 4

  Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).

• 5

  Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967).

• 6

  Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, op. cit.

• 7

  Capital, Vol. III, Chapter 48.

Collective Care and Sustaining Social Change

by Paul Messersmith-Glavin

August 2, 2024
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Image by “My Life Through A Lens”.

An Interview with Helia Rasti and Ashanti Alston

This interview is with social movement veterans who have sacrificed much, and learned a great deal, trying to change the world. Each in their own way have gained valuable insights into the personal, interpersonal, and structural dynamics at play when confronting established power and have essential lessons to convey to those newly radicalized. The interview was conducted for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, by collective member Paul Messersmith-Glavin.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin: Tell us about yourselves, in particular, how were you first politically radicalized?

Ashanti Alston: Born, Michael Alston. Plainfield, New Jersey, 1954. Just this February, I celebrated the big 7-0. I’m an official elder now.

I came of age in that period of the sixties when there was the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement, which was the key moment for me. I was a Black teenager understanding that there were people fighting for our freedom in the Civil Rights movement. And then here comes the Black Power movement and the rebellions of ’67 all over the United States.

Plainfield is a small town that’s racially divided like so many other places. But what was unique about what happened there was that Black folks had got hold of arms from a gun manufacturing plant, including crates of M-1 rifles. So, during the rebellions part of the Plainfield Black community in the West End was actually liberated for at least seven days. Even as this thirteen-year-old, I understood the importance of the movement and felt connection to it. This was serious and way different from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement.

The main rebellion was about a mile from the projects where I lived as a child. We could often hear the gunshots. Then one day there was a black car in front of the house and on the top of it in white letters was “Black Power.” And the guy in the car was giving out goods to people. That struck me, because I heard the term “Black Power,” but this was so bold. I understood the Civil Rights movement, but I didn’t know if I could deal with getting water-hosed down the street, spat on, called “nigger” in my face and just taking it. I wanted to fight back. So, this was my entry.

I don’t even think I had turned fourteen yet. And I wasn’t much of a reader at that point, but now I wanted to read! The Malcolm X autobiography. The stories of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. I wanted to go find out about them. Then when school started back up, others were also interested in fighting back. In junior high school there was no Black history. So, there was a coordinated effort to walk out of the two junior high schools and the high school and to march down to City Hall to demand it. And enough of us came out, so that when the next school year started, we had Black history.

That showed me that there was this powerful unity if we organized. We could make demands and have them met. The rebellion after that lasted a week. When the armored cars came in from the National Guard, they regained control. But it didn’t stop us. The was a community center down the street and folks were in there and they’re talking, organizing, strategizing. I was just so excited, especially to see folks from the areas that I grew up who I looked up to in getting involved.

Eventually, I found out about the Black Panther Party and my friend’s father took us all over to the different offices—from Newark, Jersey City, to Brooklyn and Harlem—to learn what we could do. So, we went to the political education classes and learned the terminologies; this revolution the Panthers were talking about required study, engagement in the community, and organizing. It was different from the spontaneous rebellions. It was more like the organizing when we demanded Black history; you had to have a sustained view and understand that this is a long-term struggle against the system.

Most of us who formed that chapter were high school students and active inside the high school where the rebellion took place. It was in that same area that we did most of our outreach—speaking with folks, selling the Panther paper, and at a certain point starting a storefront and a free clothing program. So, here we are, learning how to work amongst the people in this Panther style . . . Every time I look back at it, I’m like, “Oh my God, we were so young, but we were so ready!”

We had so many folks helping us learn the different things involved with carrying out revolutionary struggle. And it was great because coming out of the Black Power ideology, I didn’t have too much love for white folks. But the Panthers always remembered they’re human beings, too, and had relationships with so many different people. They were nationalists, but revolutionary nationalists and didn’t just chop white folks off because they’re white. It all depends on their practice.

So, it helped me to challenge some of my own limitations and to open up to what this new ideology was telling me about struggle, the history of struggles, the possibility of winning, believing in ourselves, and organizing from below. That carried me for a long time, even up into prison.

Helia Rasti: I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1980. That was at the start of an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, on the heels of a revolution that ousted a dynasty, the last Shah of Iran. It was part of a popular uprising that brought in theocratic Islamists and started over four decades of Islamist rule.

I was born into a solidly middle-class family. My parents were really scared of having to raise a daughter in the growing patriarchal environment and decided to leave as did many at that time. This was very difficult for them because they loved Iran and didn’t want to go but felt forced to. We were able to attain resident status in Germany and I lived there from age five to ten. Being a foreigner in Germany is not easy and my parents (who are both well-educated) wanted access to better opportunities like they had in Iran. So, they left Germany the first chance they could and came to the United States—the “land of opportunity.”

I was ten years old when we moved to California and had no idea about the political environment and the history of oppression, genocide, enslavement, and exploitation that the US is founded on. I think a lot of immigrants come here seeking better opportunities because whatever they left behind was so grim. And then you come here and you’re like, “whoa.” Even though I was raised with this backdrop of intense political activity and very strong anti-imperialist sentiments, I was clueless. But I could just tell this is not right. Something is not right.

I’ve always been sensitive and empathic. And I knew that despite being an immigrant, being a brown child who experienced racism, I could still always seek out love and support from my parents. But I remember encountering figures about how every five minutes a girl or a woman is raped, and feeling, “Wow, I’ve been really protected.” So, I felt it was important for me to step up for people who were more vulnerable and for voices that were being silenced.

I grew up in the Bay Area and, after high school, I went to Humboldt State in Northern California. I’ve always been drawn to nature. I was a biology major initially and I learned about Native American history, the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism, and that Native people are still around and have been resisting genocide and erasure for all these years. I also learned about different resistance movements by listening to lecture series like Michael Parenti who broke down imperialism and Marxism, US foreign policy, and how the CIA and the United States played a huge part in destroying the fabric of different cultures. And, in my country, how they stood against democratic movements to support regimes to access resources for more global power.

I was sitting with all that in the late 90s when the anti-WTO, anti-corporate, globalization movements emerged. I was on the periphery of this, but learning. And then September 11^th happened, and I was just like this is it. Ward Churchill wrote this essay about the chicken coming home to roost and I was feeling, “Oh, of course, this is going to come back to us to us. The United States is going to reap the repercussions of its global policies.” I got on the phone with my mom all excited about this and she said, “What are you saying? You’re going to get in trouble, you’re Iranian!” But I still felt these were historic times and decided that I had to leave the forest. I realize now it was a spiritual journey that led me to take on political action. It was my love for life, for the earth, for people. This is what kept me seeking out different answers when faced with the contradictions that are presented to us in society . . . So, I came home to the Bay as I realized my work was there and transferred to San Francisco State.

Within the first week of school there were student organizations tabling, including a Students for Peace group that did gorilla theater. I got in and became really involved with them. At the time we were organizing these huge demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan, and it was already clear that they were gearing up to start invading Iraq. I was a part of this mass movement; hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people globally, crying out against war.

That became my world. I spent all my time at school organizing and eventually dropped all my classes because that’s the only thing that mattered to me. I then became a part of this woman’s center that was helping to open up space for coalition building. San Francisco State has a very radical history, but since the time of the sixties and seventies, the administration has built all these guards and policies against student activism. So, we were organizing this coalition, bringing together different organizations like Ethnic Studies, the Black Student Union, and different cultural groups. We were also doing that with City College.

Eventually I dropped out of school and started doing organizing work full-time. I got involved with the Not in Our Name movement and Direct Action to Stop the War, focusing on street blockades and holding war profiteers accountable by going to them and shutting down their operations. I was especially jiving with these queer anarcho-punx doing public blockades and shutdowns. And it was like the work became my life. It’s the thing that kept me going. It felt like, this is what I was brought here for.

So, I continued to seek to deepen my understanding of what the work really was. And it was Critical Resistance that really helped to do so, especially with learning about abolition and how prison industrial abolition was a way to build against the state. At the time, I was doing environmental justice work, focusing on shutting down power plants. But I continued to encounter contradictions within organizing communities and felt I needed to do something else. I needed to figure out what my role was and not necessarily as a public or professional organizer. Again, I was always driven by my spirituality and my love. Rose Braz was a mentor of mine—what an immense, powerful woman and organizer she is—and I sought her out about some of these contradictions. And she said, “You know, you feel called to heal and you’re doing this medicine work; we need more abolitionists, more radicals to do that work. If you feel like that’s where life is taking you, go for it!” So, I did. I left the Bay and came to Portland to study natural medicine. Now I’m licensed as a clinician. But my love is still very much for the earth, for people, and dismantling obstacles to our collective liberation to allow for our ability to just live.

P M-G: You both have decades of political consciousness and organizing experience. Retrospectively, what are your biggest takeaways? What lessons have you learned that you’d want to pass on to someone just getting involved in social change work?

AA: I’ve been around for a while and when I’m speaking with young folks, I want to make sure I’m giving the best advice and encouragement that I can because I still believe that we can change this world. The thing is, you want to make sure, no matter what you have been through—the ups, the downs, the things that work, things that didn’t work—to be as honest as you can about it. When I look back on the early years—the Black Power movement to the Panthers, even up to the prison experience—then I get to see, “Oh, we could have been better in this area or that area.” The time I spent in prison was a lot of that looking back period for me. Before that it was 24/7 revolutionary work . . . not a lot of time for reflection.

But now I’m there in prison and thinking about what happened: “Why am I here? Why are so many of the comrades now in prison?” I wanted to know where we went wrong, why we lost, why the counter-intelligence program was eventually successful, and how to avoid making the mistakes again. And I got access to other readings. You know, in my head I’m still this Panther. A Marxist-Leninist. Maoist even. But the Critical Theory crew, from Eric Fromm to Herbert Marcuse and others; they had some different analysis about these revolutionary struggles that wasn’t the canon of Stalin. Then I started reading not only the critical theory, but other radicals. And, at some point, little bits and pieces of the anarchism started getting in there. These different perspectives allowed me to really think about the way we saw this struggle. What we (the Panthers) had believed was revolutionary in a sense, but with some limitations. It wasn’t great how we saw the struggles of women; it wasn’t great how we saw internalized oppression . . . Our own behaviors also contributed to our downfall. A lot of people don’t want to hear that, especially your comrades. But if you want to win, then you’ve got to let that ego shit go and say, “Where else might we have done better?” And that’s where the critical theories and anarchism and radical feminism began to help me to see things differently.

So, I want young people to understand revolution from a very personal perspective. How is it really going to impact you? What is it really opening you up to? Like, who’s Ashanti as a part of this? I’m still a part of this heterosexist, evil society and it’s been a part of my peoples’ struggle for the last 400 years. There’s no way that I can deny that. The shit of this system is also a part of me. In this struggle, it’s on two fronts; it’s not only the larger system, but also what it looks like inside of us. I want young people to see what their own connection is to this system is and to see their possibilities.

The best thing that really helped me to see this was when I started reading about anarchism. Now, not only do I want to be the best anti-sexist, but I want to open myself up to how life expresses itself. I joke about it at times when I say that when I first came out of prison I wanted to work with Love and Rage folks, but they had these spiked hair styles and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” But another part of me wanted to learn; “I don’t care how crazy they look. I want to learn.” And it showed me that there’s all kinds of folks who are oppressed by this society and who want out from under that oppression. If their lives don’t match mine, that’s okay.

The Zapatistas have that idea, too; a world where many worlds exist. Our lives are very diverse, and we all want our liberation. We just have to figure out how it’s going to work in this monstrous, US imperialist empire. So, Black folks’ struggle takes on particular characteristics, but it’s not divorced from all the other struggles—the Chicanos, the Indigenous folks, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the workers, the environmentalist movement, Palestine. It’s never simple, but it’s doable.

H.R.: I’d say never stop questioning; question your questions. Get with mentors, but also make sure that your mentors hold space for questioning and grapple with those questions with you. Recognize that you are a part of something immense. The Earth is all about life and death is a part of it, right? You are a part of something so much greater and when you take steps towards that collective health and life and love, you’re bringing with you something so much deeper. Trust that. The ongoing genocides around the world, that’s real. But the little steps that you are a part of, the little acts of kindness and love and the ways that you are showing up in support of community and life. That’s real, too. Movements are about cultivating and nourishing life as steps towards collective liberation. That is a part of that picture, too. It’s important to have this perspective that goes back and forth between the local and the global. So, continue to get involved, but don’t lose sight of your own care and holding that deep sacred space within you to stay in alignment with the goodness of life.

P M-G: Where should those of us who are dedicated to transforming society be putting our energies? And what role do you see collective care and nurturance playing in sustaining radical social movements?

H.R: We can’t be human without our connection to other humans. We’re social creatures. We’re part of a community of life that’s not just human. So, understanding your role in terms of community within that greater scheme of life, of ecological life, is important. And building these connections is so important because industrial culture has severed our connection to nature. But nature is what makes us human. We learn what it means to be human by learning from the earth. That’s something I’ve learned from Indigenous movements, writers, and activists.

It’s hard because we internalize oppression, which can be a toxin that is spread through community. And yet, community is an extended family and an extended circle of love. So, you can choose how to build community and how to engage with it. If it weren’t for my communal ties with the people who have come before me who I’m still connecting with, who inspire me, I wouldn’t be here. They keep me going. It’s hard though, and I know for me, sometimes I need to retreat in times to find my connection and to continue to show up. I need to have good boundaries and some guard up. We need to have collectively permeable boundaries. There’s a difference between having a wall, which is a tool of war, versus boundaries, which are important and healthy for life. Finding that balance is essential, especially now in a time of pandemics. I see the coronavirus as an expression of an ecological crisis. We’re going to continue to see viral storms take shape and we need to understand this balance.

A.A.: People in this struggle need to understand that this is long term. You have to have a place within you that you go to with all that you’re going to experience being in this struggle. Because it’s tough.

I just came back from an indigenous retreat in Texas at a sweat lodge that’s women led. I watched the process of building that lodge and what became so important for me was how everything they did had purpose and intentionality. This helps us to see all that is sacred. There are some important lessons in there, whether you’re Marxist, an anarchist, or just a rebel who wants change. This is still Turtle Island to Indigenous folks. And I think our objective is really to figure out how to pry this empire off the back of the Turtle so that we can all be fucking free!

What we went through back in the sixties and seventies, we got too scientific, and we missed out some things that are really about our humanity. A lot of the revolutions we put on a pedestal for being successful—like the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution—but they end up recreating some other form of oppressive society. Part of anarchism for me is to be open. So, we have to figure out how to nurture the spiritual as a source of power in this struggle. It reminds me of in the days of the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention that the Panthers held in Philly in 1970, with the idea of bringing all these movements together within the Empire. To see how we can all be free.

P M-G: What advice would you give about how we should relate to each other and accept differences of opinion without condemning each other? How do we nurture a community, while engaging in collective self-care and transformation?

H.R.: Allow principles to guide our work and have space for accountability. I know I’m not going to get along with everybody and I don’t need to work closely with everybody. I don’t need to know what the nitty-gritty of that work is. If the larger structure is being maintained and bringing us together in unity and if everyone is acting in ways that are principled and towards a shared mission, I can trust that. We’re all super different and that’s a beautiful thing. We’re not always going to get along and that’s a part of the friction and tension. But we can create a lot of forward momentum from that if it’s being guided by something that is principled and shared.

A.A.: We have to figure it out as we go, but a thing that has always attracted me to anarchism—is that part about how we are with each other. This is so key to the vision we have for the world that we want. If we don’t want a sexist world, we have to practice anti-sexism within our relations. If we don’t want an ageist or ableist world, we have to practice it now . . . When we come together now, we have to practice it, and be willing to admit we make mistakes when we practice this. It doesn’t just change automatically. And this takes compassion. When we begin to accept each other with compassion, this will be easier. Then we will learn to transform these relationships.

Young folks need to know not only how to organize in the community, but how they can change themselves and have better relationships with each other, which is part of community care. That’s why transformative practices need to be incorporated into what we do. It can’t just be you got an ideology now and you think that’s it for you. Now you are the revolutionary that can change the world. No, don’t work that way. It takes courage to be vulnerable, to say, “Yo, I need some help working through my shit ‘cuz that Empire is in me . . . so we can really build authentic revolutionary relationships that can transform the world.”

But the younger generation, they want to do better than what we did. And the level of solidarity we’re seeing in Gen Z’s pro-Palestinian support, anti-genocide is blowing my mind. I can’t remember this level of solidarity even with the anti-Vietnam War. I get a sense that they want to figure out ways how to be better with each other as they’re doing their work.

P M-G: I want to get into a little bit about what y’all think about the state of radical movements today. There’s the genocide in Gaza, there’s a major election coming up in this country . . . It’s a time of change around the world. What should we be paying attention to and doing?

A.A.: Part of my concern is security state; the state of surveillance, the continuous growth of the prison industrial complex. I think those things are still closing in on us, to the point where they have the ability to know so much about what we’re doing that it limits possibilities. But the spirit of the people is greater than man’s technology. This system is constantly trying to control the possibilities of insurrection and rebellion. We’ve still got to make this happen, but with a sense of urgency because they are determined to keep this empire going for as long as they can.

H.R.: I think it’s important to do that spiritual work and recognize that we’re all connected, intertwined. It can be really easy to project onto other people tendencies you might not like about yourself. That’s why doing that shadow work is so important. Also, globally, xenophobia is a way we separate ourselves from others and say, “Oh, but I’m not like that. My ways are better.” Getting past that illusion of superiority is important. None of us have the answer. There’s hope and uncertainty and we need to go where we’ve never been. It’s scary, but on the flip side there’s a sense of awe and mystery.

I think it’s also important to focus on infrastructure, both socially and physically. Socially, I mean, in terms of all the systems of domination that keep us in place and force us into submission with the prison industrial complex and State apparatus. I think the prison industrial complex is an expression of social infrastructure. Then there’s also the physical infrastructure and how it’s being destroyed by the neoliberal scheme to divest from it. Everything is literally falling apart. But there’s also a shift that’s taking place that’s allowing us to hone in on what really matters—how we can create systems that bring us closer together to collectively build cohesion and new infrastructure that is in line with serving life as a whole. I see people playing more with ideas around ecology. That’s what de-growth is; it’s about actually shifting the economy to value life and recognition that we don’t need to continue growing, but need to grow inward, downward, back to the earth, into society and community. That makes me feel hopeful.

We should be focusing on the Earth and climate catastrophe, while creating more points of connection because things are going to continue to unravel. The Earth is going to continue to try to shock us into making some real global changes. And that doesn’t all have to be bad. If we have systems in place that enable us to take care of each other—like mutual aid—that will allow us to pull together resources locally as things start to unravel and have better plans in place. So, connect with the people who are thinking about those things, arming and strengthening themselves with the knowledge that allows us to build out of the chaos. Do that shadow work, connect with your own source energy, and trust that it’s connected to the goodness of love and life that you were born into. Move from that place. And don’t lose heart!

A.A.: We used to talk about temporary autonomous zones. That can be any time you take a moment with other people to talk with each other and interact in ways that helps you to reconnect. Just as human beings and with the earth. You’ve got to realize that you’re not just an independent activist. In this thing here, you are connected to all that that is; from history to the future or as the Indigenous folks say, “the next seven generations.” When we talk about changing the world it’s not just the oppressive structures in the name of some revolutionary rhetoric. The change is within. We are a part of shaping culture. And culture, as a practice, is changeable. It’s always changing and that’s a beautiful thing.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin is a longtime social movement organizer, living in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. He is a Chinese medicine practitioner and member of the Perspectives on Anarchist Theory collective, the Mutual Aid Acupuncture Collective, and the Social Justice Action Center. His writing has appeared in “The Philosophy of the Beats” and “Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973—2001.” He edited and wrote the forward to “Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe,” served as the Institute for Anarchist Studies’ editor for “No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis,” and contributed the foreword to George Katsiaficas’ forthcoming “Eros and Revolution.” Follow him on Twitter @paulmessersmit4