[b]Angela Davis
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.[/b]
Or at least until it doesn’t make much sense to.
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
On the other hand, cue the world today.
One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents.
Let’s call it, say, the prison industrial complex. And that’s before we get to all the fucking jails.
Everyone is familiar with the slogan “The personal is political” – not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology.
There’s a cure for that of course: 1] pop culture 2] mass consumption and 3] the worship of celebrity. And, nowadays, not just 15 minutes at a time.
But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.
Of course it does compete with other messages.
I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.
Gramsci. That’s a name to take me back…