Beyond solidarity, compas!
Noam Chomsky talks about solidarity or extinction. It is true that much of what Eduardo Galeano predicted about the ticking bomb that is Latin America today has come true, the truth is that Latin America has always been a contested continuous land. History speaks to the impact of invasion and genocide, strategic miscegination as a weapon of wear with its preferred weapon of rape as a method for the subordination of the peoples throughout the Latin American landscape. These methods have been also the foundation of relations between the different racial groups within the United States. We are participants in a society that is born from genocide, enslavement, rape, persecution, and desperation and that has managed to emerge through profound enactments of conformity, standardization of thought and action, heroic acts of personal and collective liberation, vision, aspirational governance, and decisions that range from the mundane (such as should we collectively embrace recycling) to the inspirational (such as the position of one such Deval Patrick to legalize gay marriage because people’s civil rights are not subject to the popular vote).
What Chomsky does not get right about his plea for Northern peoples to be in solidarity with Southern peoples is that we must move beyond solidarity and embrace the shared experiences of intimate, personal, interpersonal, communal, regional, structural, cultural, and intellectual oppression we all share. His plea is that we must be in solidarity now because if we are not, we will face extinction as a species. The problem with his argument is that what is being created is already being created by all of us, together. And so the outcomes that must change are our collective outcomes, and to change those, we do not need to be in solidarity, we must love our species as a whole and the world we live in and we must change the way we act towards each other and on the Earth. As long as we think the problem is somewhere else and that we are acting on behalf of others, we will fail to change our collective behavior.
We arrive at our societies today through an intense historical process of horrific and truly astounding and beautiful human actions. And so, in full acceptance of the complexity of who we are as a species, through the anthrosphere there are portals of connection and disconnection that form a continuous line that delineates a landscape of human consciousness. I think of this when I sit with Kayhan Irani’s There is a Portal. I think of this every time I utter one of the around 8,000 Arabic words in the Spanish language I speak. The fact of our connection to each other is as true as the connection that there is between fish in the sea, and between fish and the dead fish to be found dried up in an ancient lake in Africa (See the Netflix series Connected, Dust episode).
To somehow need Global Southern peoples to be in dire straits, to need us, to be dispossessed without us, is disrespectful to the hundreds of years of resistance and social innovations those social movements have provided the world. For our solidarity to be based upon our sense of connection to the suffering of others continues to privilege a vision of Northern societies as free from strife and suffering. The fact is that the poverty experienced in the Global North extends beyond a material poverty into conditions of life that up until recently have been unheard of throughout the Global South such as spiritual and psychological torture brought about by social disconnection and values and ethics deficits in the lives of communities that give rise to a lack of generosity, care, trust, love, respect, and forgiveness. The delight of human life is in our lives in community. Indeed this is a type of wealth that up until recently has been aplenty in global southern settings and that makes immense social contributions possible as peoples, communities, and nations struggle for sovereignty, independence, and an inequitable distribution of power throughout the world.
This juxtaposition between us in the North and them in the South is no longer viable. We all breathe the same air, live on or near the same oceans, and the sun treats us all in the same way. As the system we all live with and despite of threatens air, water, ocean and land, it threatens the niche through which we have emerged as a species. This system is a many-headed hydra (see the Zapatista notion of the Capitalist Hydra) that attacks us but that is also in us. (See Aliens, no for real what a metaphor). We both build through toil and tribulation this monster and suffer from its existence. And so beyond solidarity, compas! Compañer@s, the Latin American word for those who accompany us down the path of struggle for the transformation of humanity; those with whom we share a wide breadth of life experience, for whom we do not need to translate what the foundation of our human experience has been like for us along the path of life we have been able to live into.
Our fixation with definition is about the establishment of separation. I say let’s look at the shared conditions of our lives. Our species survival is not contingent on money. Our species survival is contingent on our collective showing up for water, air, earth, to protect them from us and to safeguard them also for us. We are a species at war with itself and in danger of of killing itself off. What happened to us? Let’s get back to who we are.
And so that effort begins by praxis as a result of an undeluded and irrefutable decision to change the ways we have arranged power, resources, and life. Showing up as compas is about showing up with all we have to give to the task of teaching ourselves to be stewards on this planet. Some of us are farther along on that process than others but that does not make some of us better than others, just holders of more responsibility for one another.
