Last updated: 2 November 2022
What is liberation?
When I talk about liberation, it’s always in reference to collective liberation.
It’s about dismantling the systems of oppression that currently exist.
Also, it’s about building structures that are equitable and just.
We are working towards a world where ALL are taken care of.
Despite attempts to erase the diversity of human societies, there’s evidence that there are a million different ways to organize our society and culture. Capitalism isn’t the only option.
Yes. Let me repeat that again. There have always been many ways of being.
Social constructs are not inevitable. The systems and rules we live under right now were practiced by people on a small scale before it became our reality.
We have the power to break them down and forge them anew. We can choose not to engage with a flawed system. We can demand better.
The goal is for everyone to do well—not for everyone to suffer.
Our Current Reality
Part of the road to liberation is dealing with the oppression that is happening right now. Currently, there’s a lot of injustice in the world, affecting billions of people.
It’s a lot.
There’s police brutality and the carceral state. The assault of reproductive rights. The onslaught of anti-trans legislation. Wealth inequality. Housing insecurity.
Inaction in the face of climate change, the biggest existential crisis our species has ever faced.
The list goes on.
Most of us are familiar with this aspect of the struggle.
It’s the reason we have a desire to do what we can do to make the world a better place.
This work is important in order to minimize and, ultimately, stop the harm that impacts, destroys, and ends peoples’ lives today.
Imagination Battle
It’s not enough to tear apart the structures that exist right now. We need to create the world we want to live in right now at the same time.
There’s room for alternative economies. To model new social norms.
Erik Olin Wright notes in his article, How to Be an Anticapitalist Today: “all socioeconomic systems are complex mixes of many different kinds of economic structures, relations, and activities. No economy has ever been — or ever could be — purely capitalist.”
Currently, capitalism exists alongside other methods of producing/distributing goods and services. There’s worker-owned cooperatives. There’s families and communities. Mutual aid groups. Sharing, barter, and gift economies. Non-profits. The state. And whatever else people have come up with. (Humans can be very creative!)
Wright adds: “One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces.”
“I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, browness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.
— adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Broadly speaking, we, humans, suffer from a lack of imagination.
This is intentional. The biggest threat to the status quo is realizing that there’s a better way of doing things. Those in power do not want the masses to have this epiphany.
To undo our socialization, we need to practice imagining. Really practice.
In my experience, people are generally unhappy with the state of society. People complain a lot. Often, it’s about capitalism. (Whether they know it or not.)
If we engage in conversations in good faith, and try to find a solution, we often come up with something that isn’t capitalism.
Makes sense as solving social problems means addressing the root cause of the issue.
However, as soon as you name capitalism, or anti-capitalism, people’s first reaction is to defend the former and bash the latter.
We’re trained to be capitalist apologists; our immediate instinct to alternatives to capitalism is “that’s unrealistic.” It’s too “idealistic.”
The truth is, if we, as a human society, are able to live with a system as complicated, hypocritical, convoluted as capitalism, almost any alternative we think of is possible.
We only accept capitalism because it’s all most of us have ever known.
There is a real fear in acknowledging that a better world is possible.
We might be afraid of failing. We might be afraid that we won’t live to see it.
We need space to hold and process all that.
But, hopefully, we can make room for hope as well. Room for all the wonderful possibilities for the future that we can dream up. To work towards.