Pulling the Threads of our Cultural Narrative
On the rejection of efficiency and centering of collective liberation
When I started this blog back in 2021, I did so because I wanted to have a better understanding of the world I was living in. There was so much upheaval happening around me, and I felt lost. What was actually happening was that the threads of my cultural narrative were coming undone, causing me to question what was real and what were only the stories, beliefs, and values told to me by my culture.
Here’s some context: I had pulled my kids out of the school system, and we were living comfortably without school. I was a staunch environmentalist concerned with huge problems like peak oil and climate change. We had experimented with zero-waste living, living on a local food diet, and making the switch to active transportation. I knew that global economies were destroying mom-and-pop shops in my city. I had been volunteering with a number of local organizations, trying to find answers to these problems.
The stage was set for the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which all happened while we were planning a life-altering move away from our community and into the country to start a home-based business and a bid to enter the Back-to-the-Land movement, although I didn’t know what that was at the time.
I started writing, actually, from a place of deep depression. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of all these problems. I knew that I wanted to live my life in a way that was aligned with my beliefs about what was wrong, what was right, and what I could do.
I started with the enormous question, “What am I supposed to do?” and tried to answer that question for myself. At first, it was a centred question: How can I help? How can I fix it? What do my skills bring to the solution? And then I realized that centering myself was the wrong approach and pivoted to: What needs to be done? How can we collectively build a better solution? And maybe most importantly, how am I to live with myself in a world that feels like it’s crumbling away?
There have been so many aha! moments during the last three years. My life has honestly been changed irrevocably. Each new question and subsequent deep dive, followed by realization and understanding, has built on the previous, leading me down a path that has honestly helped to provide real tangible solutions, although I feel like I find new questions every week.
During the fall of last year, I came to an important point in the unravelling of this cultural narrative: that decolonization and opposition to capitalism were rooted in rejecting efficiency as the only end goal. I had previously written about falling in love with the notion of slow work, but I could see the ways that embracing slow work was simply a privilege. It was only with this rejection of efficiency as an end goal that I developed a whole new understanding of capitalist ideology, how its narrative speaks to us who exist within its culture, and how I might remove efficiency as a priority in designing anti-capitalist alternatives.
In the following months, I tried to place this rejection squarely in the centre of my intention: slow work is not just about doing things slowly, but about being intentionally inefficient as a fuck-you to the capitalist system that oppresses so many. It’s always been quite natural for me to “fight against” and, while continuing the work of unravelling the narrative from mother culture, I found that this particular thread pulled quite easily. It was a good thread to pull. It pulled faaaaar. It showed me how to lean into communalism. It led me to ask questions about the late-stage capitalist hyper-individualism that has been fueled by the global pandemic. But it also really begged the question: if I remove efficiency from the centre of my intention, what am I to replace it with? You can’t always just fight against. Sometimes you have to move towards.
And so this long-winded introduction arrives at the point that I wanted to make from the beginning: I believe that the focus we should centre on in our lives, our policies, our decision-making, and our actions needs to be collective liberation.
Collective liberation is a concept that centres on the interconnectedness of all forms of oppression and the belief that freedom and justice for one group are linked to the freedom and justice of all groups. It suggests that for anyone to be truly free, it is necessary to address and dismantle all systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, and others, in a collective and intersectional manner.
Collective liberation claims that no one is truly free until everyone is free from oppression. This perspective highlights the importance of solidarity and cooperation among different marginalized groups in working towards social change and creating a more just and equitable society.
“Collective liberation is a labor of love-justice. An outcome of transformation. It does not come by way of institutions, it will not be handed down from thrones of power, and it does not repeat patterns of domination. It is ground-up business. It is relational. It is tender and poetic and fierce. It can be somber and full of grief. But it also requires attention to pleasure and joy and desire and delight.”
These are high-level conceptions of collective liberation, but there are concrete and tangible examples of how this impacts our day-to-day lives. The clothes we buy, the food we eat, the way we spend our money, the jobs we have, the technology we use—almost everything we do every day is bound up in the oppression of different marginalized groups of people, human and non-human, across the planet.
Our current cultural narrative says a lot in its silence about this oppression. It asks us to ignore the systems that restrict the freedom of others so that we can live in comfort. In fact, it blurs the lines between comfort and need, and we truly believe that we cannot do without the commodities that rely on the oppression of other people and the devastation of our planet. It promotes the idea that we are individuals caught in a tangled web that has no control over the systemic injustice of others or that we are disconnected from it. But these messages couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Is it so unfathomable that people are willing to wholly dedicate themselves to collective liberation? If it is, then I ask, what are you living for? What else is the point of life exactly if not to care for each other and the land? That is why plants, microbes, all beings in our ecosystem exist. Their existence is critical to the sustainable survival of the entire ecosystem. What else could possibly be the reason for your and my existence if not for us to do our part in building a world where people, the land, our ecosystems are free to live with dignity? I am here because you are here and we are here to care deeply. In the process, we will be cared for.”
When I came to the conclusion that I wanted to dismantle the cultural myth of efficiency at all costs, I failed to recognize that the desire to disconnect from the capitalist system isn’t enough on its own. Like the common critiques of the Back-to-the-Land movement, running away from the world’s problems may provide answers for me, but it does nothing to solve those problems for others, many of whom are suffering way more than I am under late-stage capitalism and colonialism.
What’s more, it’s fucking impossible to totally opt out. We rely too heavily on modern systems of commerce, transportation, communications, etc. You name it. It’s nearly impossible for me to disconnect from all of these systems, and even if I do manage to, there are millions of other people around the world that still rely on them. Individual solutions can’t fix systemic problems.
Deprioritizing efficiency is great, and we can do this collectively. But, at the same time, we also need a vision to move towards and a grounding principle to guide the next step. Any new systems or solutions need to be built on the foundation of interconnectedness and help construct a new cultural narrative to show that we don’t exist in silos.
While I was doing some research around the idea of collective liberation, I stumbled across a name that I had seen before: Murray Bookchin.
Bookchin is a thinker and writer who I had heard of before in the context of anarchist theory. I didn’t know much about his line of thought, but I did a bit of searching and quickly became very excited. In the video below, Bookchin explores the idea that the proletarian revolution failed in part because it didn’t take into account the exploitation and oppression that exist in our other relationships outside the worker’s movement.
Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was an American anarchist, political theorist, and social ecologist. He is known for developing the theory of social ecology, which argues for the decentralization of society and the economy through the creation of decentralized, non-hierarchical communities. Excited yet? Keep reading…
Bookchin was a prominent critic of capitalism, hierarchy, and the state. He advocated for a system based on direct democracy, communal ownership of the means of production, and ecological principles. Bookchin believed that by reorganizing society along these lines, it would be possible to create a more sustainable and equitable world. He, along with anthropologist Dan Chodorkoff, founded the Institute for Social Ecology and explored ideas around building a post-capitalist, non-hierarchical utopia. Chodorkoff and Bookchin were very intentional in their reclaiming of the term utopia (the continual process of building a better society) and set out a framework of principles that would lay the groundwork for this movement. Interconnectedness, mutualism, and the notion of collective liberation are part of these core principles.
Bookchin is obviously not the only radical thinker out there to be calling for the intersectional destruction of oppressive systems to centre collective liberation.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is known for her work on intersectionality, which explores how various forms of oppression overlap, creating unique experiences of discrimination and disadvantage for individuals who belong to multiple marginalized groups.
Emma Goldman, another prominent anarchist and feminist writer, wrote extensively about the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression, including capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. She emphasized the need for solidarity among oppressed groups in the struggle for liberation.
Angela Davis speaks about the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression and the need for collective struggle against racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice.
bell hooks writes about the importance of intersectionality and solidarity among marginalized groups in achieving liberation from systems of oppression.
Audre Lorde spoke about the need for solidarity among marginalized groups and the importance of recognizing and celebrating differences while working towards common goals.
The list goes on.
I have so much to learn. I have so many more questions. I know this thread is a long one and an important one. And I’m just so glad to have come across it. I hope you’ll stick along for the ride.
Ooft so much to take in from this but I am right beside you in this line of thinking... We need to do this - together 🫶
Love this ❤️