Words Won't Cut It

Our defence against what's coming needs to be physical

Last week, Democrat Senator Cory Booker made headlines for breaking the record for longest speech in Senate history. He spoke for 25 hours, railing against Trump and Musk’s dismantling of the American government, scientific bodies, due process and social services. It was a phenomenal and tenacious display by a man willing to hold himself accountable for his party’s failures and speak truth to the fact that the whims and words of the men at the top are having real-world impact on the lives of people all over the world.

But are words enough? Can they stem the tide of what is coming?

The Tide

The world is running out of resources to maintain high living standards in post-industrial countries, the rising living standards of people across the Global South and the whimsy of the billionaires. Even just the 1%. The global elite consume vast amounts of resources. Millionaires alone will use up 70% of the global carbon budget by 2030. The thought of actively reducing their own impact is unpalatable, to say the least. A far batter idea is reducing our access to the resources we previously took for granted.

It is very likely that we are moving into a world of absolute resource segregation (a mirror of our current world where the divide is geopolitical, not financial) whereby the wealthiest and most powerful will have everything their hearts desire thanks to the rest of us going without. To fund such a thing, the economic order will have to change, as the purchasing power of the middle class will disappear with their capital. One way to ensure the flow of wealth towards the upper echelons is to force citizens to pay subscriptions for basic human needs, supplementing or altogether replacing existing tax systems. If these needs were privatised then, as we’ve seen around the world, a democratic vote can do nothing to ameliorate the quality of these services, meaning citizens could be forced to pay the highest rates for the lowest quality (see England as an example for citizens paying through the nose to a privatised water system which literally contaminated our freshwater and beaches with shit whilst executives granted themselves huge bonuses).

As energy and materials become increasingly scarce, there will be less money sloshing about the economy, meaning average people will be unable to pay their mortgages (the rates of which will have shot up) and have to give up their private property. Banks and other private individuals and corporations will move in, buying up what’s left of the housing market and forcing most people into precarious rental contracts they can barely afford.

Food prices will continue to skyrockets as crops fail around the world due to climate change, soil moisture loss, water shortages and fertiliser shortages. Fresh food will become even more of a luxury and corporations which make their profits feeding us poison will see their bottom line increase as people are forced to live off of industrialised food produce — a system which is so centralised and so energy dependent it could grind to a halt overnight leaving millions starving.

As we’re already seeing, economic and energy cuts will hit the most vulnerable first. Hospitals will be forced to choose who they treat for what; treatment plans which mitigate chronic pain for the disabled will be deemed economically unviable because the disabled are not considered to produce economic value. Healthcare for women and trans people will continue to be slashed. As will treatment plans for addictions. This is because, in the new global economy we’re hurtling towards, re-industrialisation only needs able-bodied men to work the factories. Everyone else is a body taking up space which could be reserved for a machine. Previously, the middle class bought political attention and sympathy by having purchasing power to leverage. Without that, we will be simply bodies to the political machine, a political machine which refuses to recognise the bodies it feeds on.

‘Military Keynesiasm’ will become the policy-du-jour as re-armament kickstarts the defence industry, flooding money to more corporate elites while citizens in wealthy nations continue to die of cold and hunger. As citizens gradually become used to the idea of having strong militaries again, all of a sudden there will be missions to our neighbours South of the equator who have lots of resources but little manufacturing power. Colonialism will drop the neo- prefix and extraction will resume its overtly violent nature. Again, this extraction will mostly feed a luxury economy but be justified under the guise of keeping the lights on.

The assault on our bodies, and the bodies of everyone and everything not belonging to the upper echelons of society, will be violent. We need to start asking ourselves how we plan on fighting this.

We need to get real

I just finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ beautiful book, Between the World and Me, and can’t stop thinking about the revelation he calls back to throughout the text: “Our world is physical.” It may seem odd I describe this as a “revelation”, for surely we all know that our world is physical and our bodies are physical and we are born physical and die because of that very physical-ness. And yet, Judeo-Christian Western culture is absolutely dedicated to escaping physicality. Legions of religious people dream of Heaven and many who would scoff at the idea readily talk the ear off dinner party guests about “bio-hacking”, the latest craze that considers the body a machine to be optimised in order to achieve longer life. In both cases, the primacy of the body is negated, replaced by a fanatacism that the physical world will bend to the will of Man; immortality is but an engineering or ideological problem to be solved. The common denominator is the body; flesh holds us back.

Coates would argue that flesh roots us. So would biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology. But the human world we live in today has had very little interest in flesh since it abandoned black bodies as the instrument of economic growth in 1865. Or, rather, that interest was swallowed by the shadows and sprang up as a private prison network. But the fact of this labour being hidden mirrors how almost all labour is hidden today. Most jobs which are still physical work the shadow hours; cleaners march the hallways of office blocks in the night; refuse workers whizz through the streets just before dawn breaks; construction sites are fenced off from public view. Also, the vast majority of labour which undergirds our economies is overseas: children mining cobalt in the Congo, the living legacy of Leopold’s brutal reign; garment workers hunched over cloth in giant warehouses; “agriculturalists” on the payroll of multinationals chopping down swathes of the Amazon to graze increasing numbers of cattle.

And then there are bodies which underpin the labour: those trees and cows; fresh water and wheat fields; the great expanses of ocean; Earth’s body herself, penetrated 30,000 feet deep for what we call oil, which is nothing less than the compressed and fossilised bodies of the plankton, plants and animals which walked this planet so long ago we have transformed the sacred into cheap by burning it.

All of these bodies are sacrificed to the dream of de-materiality, immortality, digitisation, of power. Power, limited by the physical human body, is inconsequential. But the mind, harnessed with the power of a thousand suns, is almost unstoppable. That is the nuclear bomb and the stock market and social media algorithm. None of these add any real value towards the world. I would be in the camp which argues they actively detract value. But not for those who are not interested in the impact these things have on the real world. For those whose interest lies simply in how interested other people are, then these weapons of mass destruction are hugely valuable.

Our world is physical, but the Western world of thought and word and value is not. This binary is one of the ways to make sense of the madness we are all being forced to live through. Why our economies are growing but people’s living standards are dropping; why Earth’s systems are close to breaking down due to human activity but the answer is always more human activity; why, despite the collective horror felt witnessing Israel’s violence in Palestine, our political leaders are gunning for war. And why none of this feels real.

That’s because, in a way, it isn’t. We live in two worlds: the human and the real. In the real world, the physical one, we have agency. In the human world, your agency is the price of entry to buy into the mass delusion that wealth is a worthwhile goal and all incarcerated men deserve to be there and violence against women is perpetuated by a few bad apples and if we just put all our activity in the cloud then the planet will be fine.

It’s why you can’t change the system from the inside; it’s all in your head.

Self-Defence

When Coates was a teenager he discovered Malcolm X and, finally, heard words and strategies which made sense of the world. Malcolm told black boys and girls to never put their body on the line, to never sacrifice themselves to the oppressive regime, and to fight tooth and nail to survive because they were beautiful, each and every one of them. Coates then relays how it was around that time he started to become suspicious of the onus on the subjugated and oppressed to practice non-violence as resistance against the systematic and relentless violence wielded against their bodies. I, too, am suspicious of this tactic. I am suspicious of how defence is construed as violence, and the bodies which are most extracted from are coerced into facilitating that extraction in the name of being above something they could never truly be above because in that delusion bodies never win. I am suspicious of the mass flattening of our hackles, the instinct which curls in our bellies and rises in our throat and snarls at those who dare endanger that which we love. I am suspicious of how our culture picks apart our bodies, demanding they be better and thinner and stronger and whiter and tanner, making loving them an uphill battle so that perhaps it is too late before we realise they were the very first thing we should have learned to defend because it is they which keep us safe in this world.

Our world is physical. We should be learning to defend ourselves, not ask for permission. We should be cutting wires and slashing tires and blowing up pipelines. We should be exploding empty Teslas and flooding Mar-a-Lago. And if it came to it, I would break every bone in Donald Trump’s upper body so he couldn’t sign another Executive Order endangering women’s bodies.

This is not violence. This is self-defence.

Andreas Malm wrote an extraordinary book a few years ago, How To Blow Up A Pipeline, in which he argued that all throughout history, civil campaigns were won by the presence of a radical flank who went beyond words. Their existence is critical to making the moderate flank — the MLKs of the world — look rational and reasonable and worth speaking to. He also vehemently argued that destruction of private property, such as pipelines and bank windows, is not violence. It is sabotage. And he showed how it has been the cornerstone of every major civil rights win over the last few centuries.

Truly defending yourself from very real threats isn’t violent. It’s effective. And it’s more effective than non-violence.

Non-violence is noble but this world is not. Those who are willing to put their bodies on the line in the hope of triggering morality are profoundly brave. I also think they are naive, for the game is rigged: the human world never cared for your body or my body or our bodies or Earth’s body. That’s why it has consumed and exploited and extracted and raped and murdered all those bodies in order to build itself. Facing down the barrel of the gun will not spontaneously germinate horror in the person pulling the trigger for there is no person pulling the trigger; people do not inhabit bodies in the human world. That’s why they are expendable. It is the people inhabiting roles and titles and legacies in the human world who are valuable.

To fight that system we need to get out of our heads and into our bodies.

My partner is a former professional rugby player. He is bigger, stronger, and faster than the vast majority of men on this planet. He’s also a former lawyer. This means that, no matter which way the argument goes, in 99% of cases he wins. I feel significantly safer with him than without him, and it inflects my behaviour.

Earlier this year, we found ourselves on the dance floor of a nightclub. Within a few minutes of arriving, a man walked past and felt me up. I immediately leaped after him, yelling, and grabbed his shirt collar, spinning him round to face me. He did what they always do: stared above my head into the distance, as if I didn’t exist and some invisible force was holding onto him. It would be comforting to say guilt stops these men from looking us in the eyes. I do not believe it is guilt. I think these men simply pretend the violated woman, the woman inside the body, doesn’t exist.

This is not the first I went after a man on a dance floor, spitting fury. It’s also not the first time I reached out to grab a man. But it is the first time I held on. I knew, in about a second, my grip and fury would be replaced by my partner’s, a man who doesn’t ask my body to justify its existence and reactions in a violent world.

When I say we need to inhabit our bodies, I don’t just mean our own. We need to make sense of the world together, through our bodies. We need to feel emboldened by one another. We need to physically defend each other. That doesn’t just mean going into battle. It means preparing our communities for what comes next, growing our own food together and sharing our resources and having each other’s backs. It means shouting your rights into a megaphone when your neighbours are being raided and blocking immigration vans from leaving. It means stepping out of the mass delusion and back into your body, and reaching out to all the other bodies. It means learning to defend ourselves.

We cannot fight against a bodily assault with words alone. Our words need to be the rallying cry for our bodies to come together and fight back. Booker’s words must flow out of the Senate floor and onto the street where we as the masses come together to love and protect and defend what is sacred which will only ever be our ability to take care of one another. We cannot fight with individual muscle alone. We cannot fight by sacrificing our bodies. But we can, with the collective weight of our will, fight for an honourable struggle, a struggle which speaks to the very essence of being human: together.

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