Egoism and Cooperation

devour me

my ideas

my essence

ineffable and ephemeral

tactile and tactless

what is owned by me?

can i own anything besides myself?

ownership is usage

usage is taken

so take me

mix my essence with yours

and devour it all

make it your own

if i survive

then maybe

I can own myself

and become Unique

In(tent)(troduction)

I want to have my cake and eat it too. When people say “pick A or B”, I always ask “what’s the secret third thing?” I see the potentialities of the world as much more open-ended than what tends to be explored in (whitestream)¹ conversations about changing material, social, relational, and spatial conditions. That’s where my conception of the ego and egoism comes in. We’ll get into what I mean by those over the course of this piece. Relatedly, I am interested in exploring my place(s) in the world as a multiple-jeopardy Black person. What might a world that accepts me look like? While I’m speaking, thinking, and feeling from my own perspective, I have an eye on the fact that I am intimately connected to my folks. I want to explore what “self-centeredness”² means for a people who’s sense of “self” is appropriated, denied, or exaggerated. How does that (re)configure our conceptions of what it means to be an individual? To be in a collective? How do those things intersect with our cultures, enabling their proliferation and/or preventing them from becoming prisons of another kind? How can we explore the multiple facets of modernity’s sacred idea of “freedom”, whether it’s “freedom from”, “freedom of”, or “freedom to”? Is that a useful abstraction for us to concretize, so that we can act effectively? I hope to start exploring these questions in the coming pages.

“Spending your life fighting for others, but not yourself, is nothing but hypocrisy. […] If you fight for ideals, then you’ll only ever be able to save ideals. That’s all.” — Archer (Fate/Stay Night by Kinoko Nasu)

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please[…] the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.” — 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

“‘But you are a great sinner, that’s true,’ he added almost solemnly, and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything?” ― Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their comrades are worse than trash! If I’m going to be called trash either way, I’d rather break the rules! And if that somehow makes me anything less than a real shinobi, then I’ll crush all of the so-called “real” shinobi!” — Obito Uchiha (Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto)

“Even If I’m a fraud, I know my dream isn’t wrong.” — Shirou Emiya (Fate/Stay Night by Kinoko Nasu)

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” — Theses On Feuerbach by Karl Marx

“In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.” — Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown

Grasping for straws, changing our conditions

I want to burn this whole colonial world down.

I yearn to negate, to unsettle all that seeks to dominate me and mine. Living in a zone of the negative, I draw upon the dark power of non-being. Where does that leave me, I wonder?

I am no soothsayer, but I can confidently, egoistically predict that new growth will rise from the ashes.

Through necromantic negation the forward path arises.

I am the new growth.

Through this trial by fire, these controlled burns of chaos, I learn not only to affirm my survival in this world, but to prepare myself to be powerful in the next.

My dark power is too offensive for now, but in it lies the raw materials for affirmation.

Positional Survey

To be Black is to sit outside of the discourse on the concepts of “subject”³ and “object”⁴ off rip. The position of object is assumed and applied to us. This sucks (to put it painfully euphemistically) when, in reality, we yearn to see ourselves not as objects, but subjects!⁵ We obviously know, even given our conditions, that we are human! This tension that is imposed upon us immediately creates issues in how we understand ourselves.

Groups are collectivized by the very nature of their shared identity. This “collection” is much of what reifies the colonized as objects, flattening us into automatons or homunculi. To facilitate this objectification, there is a relationship of domination at play, buttressed by an Us-versus-Them hierarchy. This is especially apparent with Blackness, an integral part of the process of colonial differentiation (creating taxonomies for managing empires) & colonial undifferentiation (flattening universalisms that appropriate, water down, and marginalize other ways of thinking-feeling-knowing-being). At the world-system level, the in-group is middle class (Anglo-oriented) Europeans, their emissaries, and stans. Sylvia Wynter, in Unsettling the Coloniality of Being (along with many of her other later works) tunes us into the fact that Man, as the colonial, European, White, cishet patriarch, has stolen the show, creating the very definitions and boundaries of what it means to be human.⁶ Therefore, concepts integral to modernity, like humanism, society, being, power etc. (to transmogrify the rest of Wynter’s essay title) are virtues shaped in His image (just like “we” are shaped after “God” in various Christian canons…interesting).

The obvious/straightforward answer to this problem is to advocate for our “right” to a “seat at the table”, to “prove” that we’re “human too”. This socially constructed desire, whether it manifests as assimilation or integration, leads us to seek an expansion of the boundaries in society. Fanon helps us think about this in Black Skin, White Masks when he talks about black folks having a desire to assert personhood through enacting and trying to embody white culture. Wynter, to revisit Unsettling the Coloniality of Being, talks about how “certain interests are cultivated until they [are] universalized”. This marginalizes certain “genres of being” that are by necessity underrepresented in the places where hierarchical power⁷ exists. This creates a dilemma: either the marginal must find ways to be affirmed on the margins, or disregard aspects of themselves to more neatly integrate into the metropole.

Getting represented by these systems is problematic enough due to the contradictions in and of coloniality/modernity for people who fit in or have proximity to the overrepresented modes of “being”. Said otherwise, the shit ain’t even all that good for the folks it’s made for. For folks in a “zone of non-being” as Fanon says, this becomes an issue that is orders of magnitude larger. It isn’t just the frustration of not being able to embody or reach the ideal; it’s not having that embodiment as an option. Struggles hit different when your very ability to be is brought into question.

To surpass this, us “non-beings”, have to start charting out a self-definition. It’s not worthwhile to try and become White folks or like White folks — that is a losing game. We will get better results by using our positionality as beings of “creative nothing”⁸ to diverge from the bullshit and converge upon new (and old) ways of relating that align with our self-interest(s).

This isn’t a call for a reductive focus on a single aspect of phenomenal experience. If we’re being real, focusing “solely” on The “Black Experience™” in the abstract⁹ can lead us astray, generally towards uplifting shitty cis men and protecting abusers of all stripes. This is why we have to make sure that we don’t take our exclusion from colonial configurations of power as one extreme along a single, “legible”/“valid” continuum of being, such that our only reprieve is to become colonial ourselves. By doing so, we easily take Eurocentric conceptions of how social life must be constituted as universal, rather than contingent.

To this end, we have to incorporate a transfeminist lens to our POV, so that we can combat sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and transmisogynoir — all things that constitute patriarchy. Too often, (usually cishetero)¹⁰ Black folks flatten the issues that the most marginal of us face into calls for unity under blackness, in a way that is juxtaposed or put into contradiction with other identities that folks have. There are times where maGes (marginalized genders) and/or disabled folks, for example, get sidelined due to a lack of interest from people outside of those experiences in interrogating their biases. That ain’t gonna fly. Not just because it’s “mean” or whatever to exclude people. It ignores natural, physical, material realities: there are Black people who are queer, maGe, disabled, etc, and those intersections, imbrications, and interpenetrations don’t negate their Blackness. To the contrary, we (as a forcefully “unified” community)¹¹ don’t like those things because of a desire to assimilate and capitulate to what Man says we should be, in an attempt to “game” the materialities and ontologies of social hierarchy. Again, this isn’t tenable. We can’t use Eurocentrism and coloniality to defeat Eurocentrism and coloniality. Being able to understand the pluralism and dynamism within our community on the terms of that pluralism and dynamism will do us well. Unity has to come through diversity, if it is to ever arrive.

“[…] where Black feminism stumbles is a failure to recognize the noted absence within the historical record/archives of resistance and rebellion from Black trans people, specifically Black trans women/transfems. Therefore, the positionality at play here is not merely one of sexism, but it is specifically one of cissexism and intersexism. Black trans women/transfems are not represented through the domination of “Black males” within the archives and records, we are instead categorically erased, and rather than desiring the upending of this, Black feminism and queer theory have engaged in a reterritorialization whereby our erasure has been reconfigured as overrepresentation — or as it is framed so often within queer spaces writ large, “taking up space”. Afro-pessimism, whether intentionally or unconsciously, has furthered the insistence of taking the “Black female body” as a literal, physical site that acts as the nexus for engendering the particularity of Black gender, regardless of the fact of Black trans women/transfems being delegated to the realm of the Unthought to be excavated in order to make Black gender and Black Womanhood itself legible. This is facilitated in no small part through a particular interpretation of ungendering that does not properly locate Black transgressive womanhood.” — For Those Seeking or in Flight: Black Trans*feminist Nihilism by g

We put ourselves in grave danger by not taking this seriously.¹² Riding for the margins of the margins is a requirement for any liberatory change. Those folks are of interest to us (if we are not those folks ourselves) as we deepen our understanding of our intersecting identities and experiences. More importantly, their particular experiences and desires should be fought for since worlds built that center them/us¹³ will necessarily be able to accommodate others. If we are creative enough to get out of the way and allow the flourishing of the most dispossessed, it’ll be a cakewalk to figure shit out for other folks. Our strength doesn’t come from flattening differences. It comes from struggling through and with them, making connections that don’t rely on bigotry or universalized essential properties that are dubiously applied.

By assigning “essential” properties, or properties that are “intrinsic” to how a person “is”, we presuppose some sense of objective rationality in how identities are constructed that we’re probably uncritically bringing over from Eurocentrism. With any complex object, subject, or phenomena, we don’t readily have the tools available to us to discern properties that are “immutable”. Narrow conceptions of gender within our Eurocentric paradigm, for example, lead to an essentialization that betrays any coherent understanding of gender, “sex”, sexuality, or embodiment in general. This essentializing doesn’t hold up to any heuristic that isn’t a tool of domination. It tends to come from an exaltation of rationality, especially as employed by Eurocentric universalisms and empiricisms. Rationality is but one variable in a complex body of intentional thought, decision-making, and be(com)ing. I’d argue that the “essence” (used in this case to be akin to the intent) of rationality is betrayed by its usage in isolation, when it could become much more powerful (if we decide to give it power) as a star in a constellation of knowledge-making.

In other words, we should be very careful about where we get our ideas from. This hypercritical lens on the (re)production and (over)representation that Whitestream/Eurocentric idea(l)s embody will serve us well towards any desires of “emancipation”, “freedom”, “liberty”, and so on. For any of the cultural or ideological changes that are discussed, there needs to be action taken such that those thoughts mean something. This feeds into how we understand and conceive of taking action. Charting out our own paths in this arena are important, especially so that we can understand good ways to relate to rebellious action. Keeping our particular context in mind, our insurrectionism should also be constructive. Our negation should build upon and create spaces for autonomy to flourish. We can live like Wildcats, becoming Ungovernable (word to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin) and orienting ourselves towards the ideas of rebellion, subversion, and flight (a la maroons). I like to ground in a sense of realism for this, which is broadly where I bring together the ideas gestured at by things like materialism, physicalism, and naturalism, with a more flexible and pluralistic onto-epistemology, that invites a multitude of belief systems. Said in a less philosophical way, I want to be honest about and aware of what is currently possible, along with imagining and working towards the positive things that can happen from the potentialities that exist, in a way that is culturally embodied, rather than vague and “universal”. The most flexibility comes from having a rich imagination paired with a sense of hope that understands the potentialities of the world. Things may get better, or they may not. But the fact that they can shows our opportunity to build the outcomes we want.

This orientation allows us to find fellow travelers through action rather than rhetoric. When you are out and about, doing your thing, pay attention to how others react to you. Who asks for “justification”? Who tries to become the “peace police”? On the other hand, who sides with you and yours and rides for y’all? What are the ways that each of these (groups of) folks see change happening, if at all? Why? Thinking about all of these things will help connect you and your actions to others.

One useful desire for our “constructive insurrection” would be to orient around communized control of our community.¹⁴ This would be grounded in solidarity-based formations that allow egoistic folks to exercise self-ownership over themselves and the spaces they occupy. I talk a bit about this in an ecology of liberatory movements, and am greatly inspired by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s community control of the poor community. Some basic ways we could work towards this are to (in no particular order, operationally speaking): (1) Establish (con)federations & unions of workplaces, blocks, and neighborhoods, in whatever forms people find useful (could be councils, clubs, affinity groups, assemblies, summits, etc). (2) Orient in an insurrectionary, “attack & steal” posture around the concepts of reparations, landback, and other meaningful, non-reformist “reforms”, where that Ungovernability comes in as the way we understand how we try to obtain those things. It’s not about begging for what is “owed” as much as it’s taking what is needed (or wanted more broadly!), directly fighting the multiple prongs of (settler) colonialism and coloniality, modernity, and capitalism. (3) A work program, in tandem with solidarity unions (and amenable socially-inserted unions more broadly) and cooperatives/worker-directed organizations so that people can autonomously support themselves in fulfilling work.¹⁵ (4) A conversion program for businesses¹⁶ —they can either choose to be based on solidarity and cooperation or become targets of expropriation. (5) Food sovereignty programs that allow for more self-sufficiency and resiliency regarding foodstuffs, via agroecology and other ecosystem-minded, non-industrial & post-industrial agricultural initiatives. (6) Cooperative housing, “urban planning”¹⁷, and “Anarchitecture”¹⁸ should be employed alongside other living-area-based struggles. This is so that we can create new ways to relate to space that are aligned with how we want to live. (7) Liberatory schooling models for folks, so that learning and knowledge sharing becomes a core part of how people relate to the world. It might also be worthwhile to expropriate scholarships and grants from academies, so that people can “attack & steal” from those as well. (8) organizing mutual aid, direct aid, and other solidarity projects for incarcerated people, working towards Prison Industrial Complex abolition. Everyone locked up and enslaved should be freed from their shackles and determine for themselves what life looks like.

All of these proposals would be grounded in decolonial/anticolonial, transfeminist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, ecological, and disability justice frameworks. These ideas can ground us in things we might aim for immediately and in the future. Community control as described showcases stuff we can fight for that is both meaningful currently and sets us up for further success.

I see all of these things happening through a “Compositional”¹⁹ Asset Based Community Development. The gist is that communities would orient around what they already have²⁰ and build capacity from there. This would allow for an increase in those potentialities, where people can “compose” their organizing on material needs and resolve “issues”²¹ a la conventional activism. Material needs are important to address so that more people can self-determine and more capacity can be built towards meeting desires, in labor²² and other sectoral (community, school, etc) areas. Issue-based approaches are important because they can relate to the things that people are already working towards and are passionate about, but are potentially limited by a lack of economic, systems, and class analysis. They need to play off of one another. This becomes possible through cooperating with each other, rather than seeing things as a competition, where social change is understood as zero-sum. If folks are willing to compete for scraps, they should be more than willing to cooperate for the whole meal, if and when awareness and conditions are built for that to be an option.²³

All of this work towards building new ways of relating is meant to free us from the shackles of current paradigms and allow us to create new/different “genres of being” as Wynter says. We are looking to give the idea of decolonization the teeth it requires (or to return its teeth). It’s about building the structures we need, and abolishing the ones meant to oppress us.

Are we doomed? Are we good enough? The fuck do we do?

In all of this talk about world-weaving and establishing subjectivity, we have to contend with the fact that the Earth will look vastly different in a few years than it does now, and it currently looks quite different than it did even a few years ago. This necessitates many things, among which is a different understanding of time outside of the usual “market time”. Taking for granted the way that we relate to time under these colonial, workerist, neoliberal systems will lead us astray. We have to think across scales, from the past, to the near future, to multiple generations down the line. Thinking about time in a different way, interpreted through a more complex interplay of experiences, where we intentionally create meaning through story²⁴ may be more helpful than the uni-directional mechanistic march that is commonly espoused. This may come off as needlessly philosophical, but it is useful in framing all of the concepts that we’ve been discussing and will continue to discuss. In the ecological context for example, more flexible conceptions of time that shift based on the locus of interest (rather than us pivoting around a rigid conception of time) can make it easier to think about the timetable of our local environments, relating to them better than we could if we’re thinking in fiscal quarters. Rather than growing monocrops because of the yield it will get us during harvest season, we can think of agro-ecological methods like companion planting that increase biodiversity and yield diverse food options over a longer timespan, even if we have less of this or that crop during harvest season.

Fuck Tha Anthropocene

“An egoist conception of ecology begins with the notion of the expansive self. […] the inner world, our thoughts and emotions, and the outer world, our phenomenality or sensory experience, [are] inseparable, as each reciprocally informs and defines the other. Insofar as identity can be said to exist, it is our perceptual totality, shifting from moment to moment. When we walk through the world, all that we touch and perceive is an extension of ourselves; conversely, there is no I that exists separately from our phenomenal experience. […] the self subsumes and is subsumed by the world, annihilating this subject/object dichotomy that alienates us from other beings and places.” — Symbiogenetic Desire: An Egoist Conception of Ecology by Bellamy Fitzpatrick (emphasis mine)

In our exploration of the colonial concepts that we have inherited, it becomes clear that there is a discrepancy between the ways that “humans” have negatively impacted the environment. How do we respond to this “Anthropocene”? Firstly, I’d like to say that we gotta go back to what it means to be a “human”! It’s interesting that, similar to the human nature conversation, my humanity is affirmed rather than plasticized only when it’s time to get lumped in with colonizer bullshit. This is not to say that there haven’t been other people who have caused harm to their environments in “antiquity” (folks love citing the late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions to claim that a commitment against coloniality as articulated in this piece is grounded in a misguided, essentialist view of indigeneity & pre-colonial history), but what we’re talking about in relation to capitalism and the fossil-fueled industrial revolution is something else entirely. It’s of a completely different scale, capacity, and motivation, coupled with a relatively intimate awareness of the impacts. Yes, I don’t like that there have been groups of people across the world and across time who have done sustained ecological harm, nor do I think that ecological harm is good when someone who looks like me does it. That acknowledgement doesn’t mean that it’s “okay” to prop up or absolve a society that has the most anti-life ethos we’ve ever seen (our current one), combined with an unprecedented technological capacity to act on it. The universal “human” invoked in this Anthropocene conversation is a joke to me, which is why I desire to chart out my own meaning for my existence. This is where our ecological conversations should start.

Sankofa²⁵ comes to mind as a useful orientation for this conversation. We are “retrieving” “past” lifeways and synchronizing them with information and abilities that we have now. Lots of our ancestry and other folks who embody Indigeneity had more meaningful connections with nature visavis not making an extreme bifurcation between people and nature (to the extent that some folks, like the Potawatomi, refer to what we might label as non-human with “they” pronoun signifiers,²⁶ giving the rest of the world a sense of vitality that colonial cultures reserve for humans, and God, I guess). To be clear, I am not making a claim that we all used to live in harmony until the colonial-imperialists attacked. There is just a precedent established in the fact that before European colonialism, there was more space for worldviews that allowed ecological respect. We need to tune into that resonant frequency.

We also have to be careful about porting over mainstream “environmentalist” and “conservationist” ideas for “environmental management”, because, you guessed it, those are mired in colonialism as well! Something helpful to think about in moving towards environmental justice is to center the most marginal. This idea comes from Black Feminism (I originally learned it from bell hooks) and allows us to see our intersections²⁷ and positionalities²⁸, making sure that our desires don’t come at the expense of folks who are left out, even “at the bottom”. We can’t solve ecological crises through Eurocentric colonial exclusions by way of taxonomy.

One methodology that we can devour²⁹ towards ecological ends is social ecology. This is an orientation refined principally by Murray Bookchin meant to reconcile human society with the rest of nature. One of the core contributions that Bookchin has made in ecological thought with this theory is the idea that ecological problems stem from social problems. Even if that’s not “true”³⁰, it is a useful starting point to orient ourselves ecologically. There is an interplay between the rise of humans dominating other humans and humans dominating the rest of nature. Social ecology’s philosophical foundation is dialectical naturalism, a way of understanding Hegel’s dialectical thought as a process where the universe is, in its potentialities, developing more subjectivity and particularity.³¹ Bookchin might say that the universe is becoming self-conscious. This is meant to “organicize” the dialectic, moving us away from the “mechanistic” conceptions found in dialectical materialism, especially post-Marx, if we read him in (really) good faith. It’s the difference between claiming something must or will happen (how dialectical materialism is articulated by many), and claiming something can happen. If you’re not familiar with dialectics, the basic idea³² is that contradictions exist in everything (or said otherwise, that everything exists in relation to everything else, and those relations come with tensions). Enter the heuristic language to try and apprehend how things in the universe function.

For any particular “thing”, be it a subject, object, phenomena, or process, there is a developmental pattern where the “being” (the “thing” being focused on/locus of interest) comes to contact contradicts and a “nothing”.³³ This tension creates a coalescence where the two “become”/“create”/establish (this process of change referred to as “becoming”) a new “being”. This leads to a new dynamic where our focus shifts to this “combined” “being”, and the cycle repeats. This coalescence doesn’t have to look like a “meeting in the middle”, where there is parity in representation from previously “opposing” sides. It can be mutualistic, commensalistic, amensalistic, parasitic, predatory, competitive, or cooperative. It can also lead to more than one “being”, or lead to different qualitative changes with the two “beings” that come into contact. It’s all about perspective and vantage point.

A simplified, metaphorical example of this might be a seed… a tiny, dormant little plant with many potentialities: it may become a strong plant, it may not get the nutrients it needs and dies, it could become food for some animal, etc. This is the “being” we will focus on. It’s negation, the “nothing” that it comes in contact with is the soil. It lacks the form and potentialities of the seed, but it also has necessary nutrients for the seed to embody a subjective or particular potentiality, its growth into the plant that it can “become”.³⁴ Through this contact, the germination of the seed in the soil leads to little growths, a seed “becoming” a sprouting plant. This may lead to more negations, where the plant reaches the end of its life, dying and returning nutrients into the soil, from which more seeds can sprout. A “Being” comes into contact with “Nothing”, “Becoming” a “new” “Being”, over and over again.

This dialectical orientation sets us up nicely for “egoizing” our ecological thought. The core piece of this is a commitment to relationality and becoming. This is meant to “unsettle” any abstractions that are given to us “from above” by some authority figure³⁵ we may or may not have awareness of. By using this tool of relationality, I can build towards having new, more specific ways to relate to the environment; if I can relate to myself and others egoistically, I can base my treatment of others on the uniqueness or particularity/subjectivity/individuality of that which I am interacting with.

This approach works to occlude authoritarian and hierarchical ways of relating, because those modes of being don’t “unsettle” current paradigms. ³⁶ We are trying to inhabit a more voluntary, complete egoism that is unburdened by “settled” paradigms. This is not a call for us to throw away everything that we perceive as being connected to or touched by coloniality. I see a desire to “return” to a “pure state” equally reactionary to coloniality, with no liberatory potentialities. I’m not gonna decry science or philosophy ad infinitum just because white dudes have monopolized those fields (and created those disciplinary boundaries) via ontocide and epistemicide. I will, however, treat those worldviews and modes of understanding with the criticality that they have earned by their (1) incongruencies with reality and (2) centrality in wider apparatuses of immiseration to colonized peoples.

If we align or find resonance³⁷ with “universal” abstractions and “fixed” ideas that (we perceive as) com(e)(ing) from Eurocentric sources, such as beauty, love, or altruism, it doesn’t “violate some egoist code” to feel these things or embody them. The issue is when they embody us.

Pulling up with the ego

At this point, it could be useful to define some things. What do I mean by egoism? What is ego? Ego is an expansive form of desire. It is the ever shifting, ephemeral, unique individual’s self-interest. The main components of this interest or desire are the spiritual/intuitive, r(el)ational, physical/sensual, and emotional.

To zoom in here, the spiritual and intuitive dimensions are appealing to soulful elements of desire: the things that fit into your values, principles, and ethics (if you find those useful), what drives your purpose, and gives you inspiration. All of these are framed in a culturally relevant way, and thus will look different from person to person, with similarities appearing between folks who share cultural features and rituals.

The rational and relational are about appealing to the head. This is where reason, facts, and logic, interpreted both in the mainstream sense³⁸ and expansive, counter-hegemonic senses,³⁹ are valued. Things like providing data, statistics, context, and evidence, with an appeal towards problem-solving abilities will go far with this dimension of desire.

The physical and sensual dimension are all about having material needs met. It’s about making sure people are fed, housed, clothed, comfortable, stimulated, and safe. These are very practical (see tangible) and generally immediate concerns.

The emotional dimension is about appealing to the heart. This is where empathy, emotionality, and sociality thrive.

All of these facets make up what I am referring to when I am talking about desire. I am not just talking about one facet in an isolated manner, conceived of as something to “be achieved” within a specific time window. I look at it as a holistic, interconnected and interpenetrated endeavor, where the totality of all of these come together in an emergent way to create desire. If all of these elements exist in relation to each other, desire is the “greater than the sum of its parts” phenomenon that occurs as the result of those interactions.

If we want to supersede the negative aspects of the hierarchical cultures that we’re subjugated to, we may do well to start understanding this expansive sense of desire as it relates to the alternate conception of time I discussed earlier. It is the subjective or particular understanding that only we can have in a given moment of our needs. This points us towards constructing an outcome that respects all of our selves and the things that we care about to the best of our ability. One facet of us won’t become something that rules over us. We don’t want to chase momentary highs to screw our future selves over, or wait for pleasure at the expense of current experience. We have to decide for ourselves what is important to us, and look critically, thinking deeply about why we made that choice, so as to ensure that we are not operating in a dominating way over ourselves or others.

Egoism is the overall framework I employ to satisfy my ego, as defined above. It’s how I get to what I want, informed by a sense of realism. In other words, it’s grounded–an acknowledgement that the way I access self-ownership is informed by and impacted by what I have done, what I have experienced, what is possible, and what has been done to me. This is not to say that these things are deterministic⁴⁰. It is an acknowledgement that we are connected to the world around us, so even radically imaginative conceptions of upheaval must account for this. This leaves the door kinda open. If egoism is how I get to my desire, what does that mean? It might be illuminating to talk about what it doesn’t. We are not talking about ethical egoism or psychological egoism.

Ethical egoism is the idea that morality comes from self interest, generally defined as “what works for one’s narrow gain in the current moment”. I’m not (self-)interested in this because I don’t give a shit about morality for its own sake, nor do I want to create a new “moral framework”. I want to do something because I find value in it, not because I am told to find value in it or I feel the need to justify it based on some code, to generalize and abstract it for the sake of absolving my guilt.⁴¹

Psychological egoism is the idea that we are always acting in our self-interest. In this framework, by virtue of acting, we are embodying selfishness. We are egoists by nature of acting in the world, with the rationalistic assumption being that our actions always align with our own reproduction (in the socioeconomic and biological sense). This is self-fulfilling in a way that doesn’t yield useful results… it doesn’t point us towards a better understanding of ourselves, each other, or the things that exist around us. If I am always acting in my own self interest, then what’s the point of “unsettling” anything??? Why try to change my lot if I’m already doing what I want? Psychological egoism may hold an unintentional weight, insofar we are acting for someone’s ego, even if it’s not our own (I’m doing x thing because of my family/country/partner/career obligation). It may be useful if your desires fit nicely into the status quo. For those of us upon which the status quo is built and is defined in opposition to, this isn’t tenable. Both of these egoisms may have their uses, but at best they are food for understanding my own egoism better.

I also separate egoism(s) from egotism, though obvious resonances exist. Egotism’s method to satisfy ego is patently narrow, where one tries to satisfy ego through domination. It is a zero sum orientation that I have no interest in. I am skeptical of being able to fulfill my desires holistically if I am orienting in zero-sum, domineering, oppressive, and coercive ways. Even in the short term, this just feels like a fruitless pursuit.

Self-insert

Egoism is about me living out my particularity or radical subjectivity in a way that doesn’t deny other people the ability to live out theirs.⁴² It is meant for me to think deeply about my actions and judge if I am doing them for myself or for some higher power I am subscribing to, whether that subscription is conscious or unconscious. It is a check to make sure my motivations for action are my motivations. If I love someone, it is because I want to, not because I have to. It’s an orientation meant to foster deep connections and/while protect(ing) against interpersonal and structural abuses. It also gives me the ability to understand the “inner workings” of those things more clearly by situating them in relation to my desires. Whenever I am faced with a choice, I am judging it against my desires while working to “unsettle the coloniality” of those desires so that they aren’t harmful to myself and others.

This is motivated by an interest in creating specific, unique relationships to the world around me, with as much fidelity as I can muster. My uniqueness is my totality, and by acting on that, I can create a practice and method that allows for deeper and more enriching embodiments and explorations of my ego. It is building an awareness of myself and the world that I am connected to, so that I can relate to it in a way that isn’t self-sacrificial, whether that is sacrificing my future self to my current self, my current self to my past self, or any of myselves to “the world” in an abstract sense. I am trying to get under those abstractions, to see what is happening under the hood, so that I can be present and unburdened. It is through this process that I see utility in creation along with negation. This is why I actively struggle to imagine and make a new world, rather than just raging against the current one. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the most salient one to me is the fact that someone else will, whether I decide to or not. We are currently living in a world sparked by someone’s imagination. People created this world with intention (even if every aspect of it didn’t come about intentionally). It takes intention to “unsettle”.

My voluntary egoism, where I am (building) aware(ness) of my desire and choosing how to engage with it in a way that “unsettles” reality, is bound(ed) by other people. If everyone around me has a shit life, no matter how materially sound and stable I am, that tension will sour things. If I focus on getting stuff, chasing the bag and shit like that, the idea of bag-chasing easily becomes a new fixed idea, an abstraction that rules over me. It’s replacing my desires with the desires of those who benefit from the ideology of capital. Being a consumerist in that sense is like living in a massive gilded cage. Being in a relatively small shitty cage currently, the gilded cage is “better”, but we’re greedy over here. I’m tryna blow up all the cages so I ain’t gotta worry about myself (and by nature of the act anybody else) being put in one. I want to destroy atomization and build a sense of deep relatedness with other unique individuals. My self-ownership is bounded by how much other people have an awareness of their self-ownership.

To state this in a slightly different way, I’d like to lean on Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Lorde understands the erotic, a great word to use interchangeably with how I’ve used desire or ego, as “a true knowledge, […] the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding”. The erotic orbits around the idea of getting in touch with “feminine and spiritual dimensions” of our desire, a marked difference from Eurocentric conceptions of how to relate to the self. Eurocentrism subordinates these ideas to objectivity and reason, where emotions and the inspired spirit are generally seen as annoyances to be sublimated. There are resonances with how Lorde describes “sensation without feeling” in regards to different conceptions of the erotic than the one she’s articulating and how I think of “egotism”, where folks are ashamed of their desire, or misapply desire to short term domineering pursuits such as private property or popularity. We might find value in working towards an “erotic as power” or “intentional egoism”, where we use the erotic (or how I’ve described ego) to point us towards what we want.

This leads to my egoism having an expansive character, where we are able to work for what we want beyond “superficial” “sensations”. This expansive orientation acknowledges how we as people are interconnected to the world at large. We are shaped by and shape the world. This doesn’t mean that we have to be subsumed by the world, though. My egoism is a generative creativity, where I’m starting from a place of “creative nothing”, existing as an embodiment of dialectical negation for the “being” of modernity, coloniality, and kkkapitalism. This is the “dark power” I talked about earlier. Being severed from humanity via the “overrepresentation of Man” Wynter discusses keys me into the power that can come from having no “essential” properties. I can remake myself constantly. I am constituted by conscious activity. Each moment gives me a different name. I am like an etch-a-sketch; no matter what has been drawn on me, I have the potential to reconfigure myself to fit new situations and desires from moment-to-moment.⁴³

Black folks are put in this position naturally by the antiblack ableist cisheteropatriarchal world-system. If we are to affirm our existence, rather than running from our current positionality, we should see the power and potential it presents — the ability to fight for ourselves, accessing a freedom that we are positioned to experience in a way only we can illuminate.

Selfishness ain’t all bad

Egoism might be a provocative way to refer to this idea since it colloquially has a lot of overlap with the idea of egotism. Part of my goal is to reclaim the ideas embedded in conceptions of how we relate to our egos, to get away from the shame of wanting things, since we won’t stop wanting things. Shame, while having its place in social life, tends to prevent healthy engagements with our desire when we self-generate it. I separate egoism and egotism since there is room for my egoism to exist in a much more expansive form than that. I genuinely believe that the way to reach my desire is to destroy coloniality, even with the understanding that it is a system of domination, existing outside of the range of individual power. I want to bridge the gap between myself and the world I am alienated from as much as I can to facilitate this shift. Again, this is not egotism, as trying to reach my desire through neoliberal individualism like that furthers alienation. I am not trying to “earn” the “right” to embody and experience my desire, especially in a social Darwinist, “survival of the fittest” sense, where the capacity for self-actualization is quantized to moral or ethical character. That formulation will always return low numbers for me, as I am not seen as a being with either of those properties, except for when it’s time to discuss humanity’s ills or get my culture appropriated. However, as a being who does exist and has desire (irrespective of what modernity, coloniality, etc has to say about it), I am a being self-actualized. My journey is about being able to embody that in a fuller way, to truly feel those sensations that come from listening to my ego, my desire.

Again, relationality is a very useful heuristic to have in our “mental toolbox” for this effort. My desire is bounded by the ability for people who share my life-station to fulfill their desire. I want us all to be egoists in our own ways. The power that we employ together can be described as finding power-within to employ our power-to as power-with, rather than sublimating our power-within to wield power-over others (or the more likely case of being led). Power-over leads to subjugation to abstract ideals, systems, and people, whether it’s through a “unity at all costs” collectivism, or the egotism of individualism. We have to be really careful that we don’t fall into this dichotomous trap if we are looking to destroy the oppressive structures that exist.

“[…] I am a communist because I am a greedy motherfucker. I don’t aspire to own the means of production just to better my quality of life; I want to own the means because I want to be the owner. I want to own of the entire wealth and culture of society. I want the world to be my property. I want it all.”– Egoism: The Basis for Communism by Ralph Leonard

The importance of the individual here is not meant to deny connection; it’s the opposite. What better way to facilitate connections than through desire? If it’s based on what I want to do, rather than what I have to do, it’s going to hit different. This seems like a much more durable method of building connection than relying on things like “familial ties”, “national obligation”, “social status”, or “work duties”. These universals are a useful way for the cultures that rule to reproduce themselves, but aren’t the only available modes of cultural reproduction. Even my position about orienting around desire is grounded in the subversive cultures that I’m pulling from and spotlighting, where even something like taking out the trash can be desirable in a context that makes it so.⁴⁴ The stance taken against universalisms and abstractions is not meant to decry their utility in total,⁴⁵ but to have a better, more critical and intentional method to relate to the things positioned as “universals”, with the capacity and capability to destroy them as needed. My understanding is that the supermajority of these abstractions are getting trashed. But there may be utility in some of them (or rather, we may contextually keep heuristics and models where they are useful). I just want to make sure that we see these things as tools or helpers, and not become their tools. To use some science/logic terminology: evidence should trump hypotheses, not the other way around.

This flexible orientation is supremely important to me, given the fact that I have conditions applied to me, that I can’t “ignore”. Antiblackness and all of its co-constitutive elements deny me the “right” to “humanity”, but I desire to experience all of the ideas (and more) that people are getting at when they speak on such rights as “freedom”, “equality”, “humanity”, “human potential”, and so on. Since these ideals were established in contradiction and contradistinction to my being, they aren’t accessible or legible to me in the world as it stands. I don’t want to focus on what I “am” in the current paradigms, but what I “could be” under different conditions that I (co-)create.

I see this discussion to a certain extent as inspired by Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, where the egoism there is interested in a critique of modernity and the “sacred”. I, on a sibling path to Saint Max, am working towards a non-methodological method, a hypercritical (set of) heuristic(s) for rebuilding relationships, rather than seeing it as just a project of negation.⁴⁶ I want to build as well as destroy. From where I stand, it is more about about change and dialectical development operating as or on a horizon of “becoming” (as in things changing over space-time, never really “arriving” at an “endpoint”), rather than focusing on establishing a new “being” (a thing as what it is, which suggests a lack of change, or a fixedness). So, by using the power of my positionality as a “creative nothing”, I seek to chart out a new “becoming”, against a colonial “being”. I don’t want to throw away my “properties”; I want to make them my “property”. I want to build my own relationship to all of the facets of myself, and the I that is what I interact with, informed by the deep histories and current, situated realities of those “properties”, “objects”, “subjects”, and actions. I don’t want to be haunted by morals, religions, laws, or other ideals that sit above me, uncaring for my desire. I want, if I choose to engage with those things, to use them as they remain useful. If I start to dampen my internal flame for the sake of conformity, then I will start to become alienated from myself.

I want to be clear about how I relate to the concept of “the self”. I see Eurocentric conceptions as trying “to earn” the self. When we base our value on things outside of us,⁴⁷ when we work on reifying abstractions, we “understand” self-actualization through an arduous journey of working hard (at least in many Eurocentric contexts, due to Protestant work ethics being wedded to capitalism’s core drives). This is ending at the self (seeing it as something we arrive at). This can lead to the kind of vulgar/narrow ego(t)ism that we discussed, where we don’t have the ability to see how fraught with contradictions, both dialectical and logical, our approach to finding ourselves is in those modes. At the very least, in imperial, statist, capitalist paradigms, these modes of being congeal into an unsightly mass. This can create a bounded dichotomy, where the options are seeing people as silos or cogs (isolated individualism or flattening collectivism). Both are inadequate responses to the information & experiences that life gives us. Neither will “save” us. The reality is that we are not alone, and we are singular.

On the other hand, I start with an understanding that I am a self. I determine myself, I assert myself, I actualize myself. Rather than following some multi-step program to reach a humanistic Enlightenment, I follow what I desire in the present. Insofar as there is a journey, it is a battle against coloniality. It is creating space for that self-determination. It is fulfilling my desire, while expanding my understanding of what that looks like. This is in opposition to passively “going along” with things, which sows the seeds of domination, leading to people who are “included” in the ideal and those who are “excluded”. It’s thinking so deeply of yourself that “others” stop being “othered”.

My understanding is better thought of as relative, operating in assemblages, networks, rhizomes, and arrays, rather than linear or fixed. I am working towards “devouring” the world around me, seeing things for their uniqueness, interconnections, and permeations so that I can better position myself. Any categories that are employed are meant to be helpful in this pursuit. In this process of “devouring”, I don’t desire control or domination over the world. Nor do I want to engender a flimsy “unity” that has to be held together with authoritarianism. This “devouring” acknowledges the interconnections between, intrinsic value, and use value of those around me. Do I command what I eat? That would be a weird way to think of it. I appreciate the land and communities in which I reside for taking care of and constantly remaking me. I understand, however crudely, that while the universe wouldn’t be the same without me, I wouldn’t be able to exist without the universe. I understand that any labels, associations, categories, or definitions are tools, at best a sketch or snapshot of a moment in time, rather than the thing that they are representing. My name doesn’t contain me, but it helps point towards me.

To connect with others, I create unique relationships and formations that are meant to serve a particular purpose, which can be as simple as “because I felt like it”. Unity, or what I feel might more accurately be called (material) solidarity, should come from the “expansive” egoism that I’ve been describing. In a political context, for example, theoretical, tactical, and strategic alignment should come from the desire of connecting more voluntarily with my ego/erotic, rather than things such as morals, obligations, commitments, etc. If those come from being an egoist, then it is fine. Otherwise, in my view, we are creating reifications with the potential to have a mind of their own. Again, we greedy. I want to have the benefits of experiencing meaningful community and culture, without the drawbacks of abuse and bigotry. I think this expansive egoism I’m chatting about is a method for me to work my way “out” from myself towards those things, creating stronger bonds along the way. I want to make those properties my property.

The fact that we can move from the individual to material solidarity is critical. Collective action is the only way for people categorically excluded from power to either commandeer the space or create a new one. A hyper atomized conception of self-hood is a non-starter when we have this in mind. Being in community with each other allows for us to embody our egos, using our desire as power. Without this, the overarching structures will hold us back from ourselves.⁴⁸

I want to create a world where radical subjectivity and particularity are celebrated. Note that radical is meant as roots-grasping, rather than its misused paramour, “extremism”. I’m looking to “radicalize” subjectivity as a concept, part of which is fighting against “objectification”, and part of which is inoculating against a tendency to “valorize” narrow conceptions of the individual at the expense of deeper connections with desire. This necessitates, in my view, a sense of self-determination and a communistic horizon. I want to destroy or “unsettle” coloniality, to create space to live in and live out my desires. This “unsettling” isn’t meant to be “against” love, or belief, or community, or any other concepts that have emerged under colonial hegemonies. More accurately, if you find value in an aspect of love, I’m not trying to tell you that your personal relationship with love is bad or Eurocentric. I’m just saying that you should be sure of what you mean when you say that, and let go of all of the ideological baggage that is bound up in that concept, since the parts that you like are usually used to sneak in the parts that keep you dominated. I am taking a stance against the manifestations of those ideas that create relations of dominion. When these ideas occupy a place of authority, where they are being justified because of their identification as a virtue/value/ethic etc, that’s what I don’t fuck with. For anything that currently rests as a fixed abstraction or concept, if you find utility in it, and it doesn’t dominate you, great. Otherwise, I rail against that shit because I desire to chart out my own existence. A communist horizon facilitates this turn, allowing us to point towards ourselves and each other rather than being a tool of some “higher power”. Communism as a horizon fits into our orientation of “creative nothing” as the grounding towards “becoming”. We negate so that we can create.

Conclusion

The egoism discussed is, at its foundation, an orientation that is meant to enable engagement with the world on my terms and its terms. It is very easy to mistake maps for territories (to refer to another Wynter essay title), so I am looking to figure out how to get rid of shoddy maps, and to take territories for what they are, keeping in mind what I want. I am simultaneously looking to embody my desire without letting it overtake me. I want to own my desire, rather than it taking a life of its own.

This egoism has to take on an anti-colonial/decolonial character, because many other conceptions of egoism (that are labeled as such) are couched (with)in the confines of coloniality. To “unsettle” coloniality, I act from a place of “creative nothing”, making spaces conducive to “becoming”, our hopeful horizon of radically subjective, communistic development. I can’t just assume that my liberation will come from personal action in the Eurocentric individualist sense. I also understand the importance of autonomous individuals in any effective action.

This egoism, with its decolonial character, does not assume an isolated person in the sense of a “closed system”, as that is not reality. Reality is interconnections, intersections, and imbrications, in a messy assemblage. This egoism is trying to start from a place of valuing autonomy to build more meaningful connections. Put simply, if I’m hanging out with you because I rock with you, both of us are going to have a better experience than if a parent, patriarch, or patriot told us to.

Non-committal commitment, or non-attaching attachment is how I’d describe the way I want to relate to things. I want to feel things deeply, to connect intimately with the world around me. Rather than a (conventionally) hedonistic sprint away from pain, or a numb, cold and calculating acceptance (or avoidance to through rationalization) of it, I want to embrace pain. Risking the pain from “losing” something that I’ve intimately connected to is part of that deeper connection I’m looking for. If I want to make my “properties” my “property”, this is a potential stop on that journey as an egoistic person. As I am more willing to feel my emotions and explore my desires in general, keeping in mind all the risks associated with vulnerability, I can have ownership of those emotional highs and lows, with awareness that they won’t and shouldn’t last forever. If loss completely ruins me, or if I get lost in an emotional peak, neurodivergence notwithstanding, that is a sign that the way I’m relating to that other unique individual, whether it is a person, place, or thing, may not be as egoistic as I’d want it to be.

This connects in a very meaningful way to social change. Egoism can’t fight alone. I see egoism as a dialectical (or dialectical-devouring) movement between the individual ego, egoist formations, and egoist culture. We’ve said a lot about ego here, so hopefully you can follow what I mean on that front. Egoist formations are about building group relationships with people that everyone is able to exercise ownership over. Egoist cultures are the ways that we describe these relationships, reproduce them, and embody them. These things all play together to create that effect of building meaningful connection while still fostering individuality. This interplay describes the scaffolding of egoistic movements and practice.

If you asked me to describe my egoism in one word, it’d be “intentionality”.

This path I’ve laid out is the one I’d like to travel. It will, if I don’t fuck it up, help me to “unsettle” paradigms that hold down me and mine, and allow for me to have a good time while doing it.

Footnotes

1. This is an idea coined by Claude Dennis to articulate the ways in which Eurocentric perspectives are centered in… everything.
2. Throughout this essay, I toy with “morally dubious” ideas to point out how nonsensical they are for people who are left outside of the confines of humanity (not meant in a one-dimensional sense; this is my attempt to point towards the fact that Blackness is specifically treated as a site of “plastic” humanity, where we can be subhuman, superhuman, or human depending on the situation. This is ultimately dehumanizing, since we are not allowed to just… be).. I’m looking at this reality to point towards how ridiculous those fixed concepts are.
3. I am using subject here to refer to the idea of a being capable of having whatever we consider to be “consciousness” in the human-centered sense. I do this somewhat cheekily, as I am not convinced of the utility of exalting homo sapiens as a species, or narrowly taking human experiences of consciousness as the only valid mode. I’m interested in self-determination for Black folks — so I use this familiar language to gesture at that, as limited as it is. I also don’t want to rush towards an object oriented ontology, since we have to directly address coloniality no matter what our conceptions of being and becoming are.
4. Object is everything else in the universe besides those who can hold subjectivity, as defined earlier.
5. This is important, not for the sake of reifying anthropomorphic conceptions of “being”, but to say that, for Black folks, we can not abolish the subject/object dichotomy just by equating everything in the universe to objects, even if those objects are considered to (or do) have a sense of vitality, essence, or “life”. This articulates the differences between trying to resolve difference by reaching for equality or acknowledging difference for the sake of building complementarity grounded in interdependence and contextuality. Orienting around subjects in this way is meant to dialectically move towards a syncretic perspective in which we (1) appreciate the agency of objects a la the insights provided by an animism, object oriented ontology, new materialism, and/or speculative realism, we (2) address the unique position Blackness has in the construction of the concept of “human”, and (3) the unique capacities that Homo sapiens have to radically change and interact with material and social conditions. It’s moving towards an appreciation of the vitality of the universe and its constituent elements through getting in touch with the ability to deeply embody ownership of the self and its relationships.
6. This is not to say that “humans” don’t exist (everyone that we think of being in this biological species is definitely in this biological species), but that our common understanding of what it means to be human is defined using White cis men as the standard, language, and primary mode of access. This creates problems when we take a particular form of embodiment and assume that everything has to be compared to that.
7. Wynter is referring to the ways that (valid) knowledges are created in the quoted section, but I believe that this refers to all of the things that are touched by coloniality.
8. This is another way to articulate the dark power concept from earlier. It is simultaneously acknowledging Black existence outside of mainstream political and social fulfillment, while holding the fact that there is a possibility for those things within a different paradigm that we co-create. This doesn’t take the social realities of Blackness in antiblack systems for granted, and therefore acknowledges the ways that change can happen. By understanding social realities as having meaningful impact on and influenced by sociogenic, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic conceptions (to refer to Fanon and Wynter’s explorations), we can acknowledge what is currently happening and craft responses that don’t keep us trapped within the bounds of thinking and acting with/in the same philosophical and practical terms of the oppressors.
9. If we focus on a mythological, monolithic, or a disembodied, philosophical picture of Black folks, rather than having our thoughts rooted in actual experiences of actual human beings, we are much more likely to uncritically assume the perspectives of the dominant systems, which deny the very categories of being (the ability to create meaning and knowing) to Black folks.
10. Opinion polls are flawed but can be useful as a “from above” starting point to understand certain dynamics in society. Pew’s Black Americans’ views on transgender and nonbinary issues is a useful way to open the conversation on some of the contradictions (in the dialectical sense) that we face in our Black communities, here in the “US”.
11. There is a really important point to be made here about the ways in which Unity is engendered, and how it in many cases takes for granted the categories made by the oppressor classes. Building unity uncritically along these lines leads to authoritarianism.
12. If we leave out the most marginal in our spaces, especially along the lines of ignorance or disdain for people who bypass binaries around gender, sexuality, or embodiment, we forsake ourselves. We have to orient around creating spaces of belonging with the different sections of our diaspora, rather than treating it as a nicety or appendage to our “primary concerns”.
13. Take centering here to mean abolishing the current center. This is not a project of creating a “new world Order”. It is abolishing Order as such — a world where people currently experiencing multiple jeopardies can feel safe and happy and cared for is where centralized power goes to die. The center evoked here is about energy, focus, and how we craft our knowledges, rather than placing non-monied Black maGes in seats of parliamentary power or some shit. It’s (self-)determination, not assimilation or integration.
14. This could be any version of community, which I’ll define in the broadest sense (people who exist in relation to one another). In this context, I’m referring to geographic communities like blocks and neighborhoods. Note that we tend to be very good at valorizing community, but it is not faultless. “Community”, when thought of solely on that level of complexity (as a homogenous unit/bloc) can erase the ways that people on the margins can be forgotten about (for example, do you consider houseless folks in your area to be your “neighbors”?). We have to be careful when employing this idea, so that we are able to surpass any limitations that the framework provides.
15. We shouldn’t force people to do things they don’t wanna. If there are “shit jobs”, or jobs that are understood to be otherwise unappealing that are deemed necessary, we figure out ways to distribute the labor.
16. This assumes that the businesses do something that, at the very least, has kernels of liberatory potential in it. We might want to convert a local restaurant into a decommodified food sharing space, for example. In contrast, we might decide that a pollutive factory isn’t something that we want to have, so we would shut that down.
17. Urban planning here is meant in the broadest sense, where we are thinking of ways to inhabit and shape the built environment. For our purposes, this would be from the “constructive insurrection” approach, where we understand the coloniality of urban planning and figure out how we can combat neo-colonial development practices and establish liberatory ones.
18. Anarchitecture is taking an anarchistic approach to our built environment, where it becomes something that is ecological, flexible, and participatory. It’s maximizing the ability for the people using and/or occupying a space to dictate how it functions.
19. I am referring to the essay “The Strategy of Composition • Ill Will”, in which Farrell discusses the ways that different sections of a movement can “compose” into a cohesive whole. I am appropriating this idea, devouring it into my own framework. For me, this is about building solidarity from the ground up, working with/in the tensions that exist between different blocs of a given grouping, building unified action that embodies the negation of authoritarianism. We might achieve this by trying to resolve (or sit with) those tensions in ways that point towards the flourishing of the folks that are the most marginal in our composition. To give a concrete example, we might, if there are people who are sexist in our composition, center the needs of the maGes harmed, rather than trying to uphold unity by protecting/absolving those causing harm, for the sake of strengthening our composition-long term vis a vis our anti-oppressive stances.
20. This is both what people quite literally have access to right now, and what can be obtained, in the sense of possibility, based on current conditions, in relatively short order. If there’s an easy lick to hit that wouldn’t drain resources and bring unnecessary risk, that would fit into this!
21. There is a lot of overlap with these ideas, but there can be distinctions made (dubious as they are) between things like labor organizing and solidarity organizing for specific causes/issues. We want to bring those worlds together.
22. “Labor” is meant in the broadest sense, both to encompass traditional explorations found in Marxian writings, and the kinds of reproductive labors that get devalued but uphold the system, like housecare, people care, informal work, gig work, sex work, and the like.
23. This potentially necessitates a move toward organizing around desires while expanding people’s conception of desire. It is showing people that fighting over scraps and being horizontally hostile is stoked by power hoarders and power mongers to our detriment, and that people who have more privilege, even at the bottom, may see some benefit from upholding the current power structure (at least to some degree). If we can zoom into the concerns of unique individuals, and collaborate on ways to respond to them that don’t screw us over later, we have a good chance at undermining horizontal hostility and seeking out full liberation. We can use that vantage point to see and focus on the contradictions between blocs of the monied classes, heightening them to create an advantage.
24. I would argue that we already do this, but tend to filter it through this very linear, past-present-future paradigm. We tell our stories using one narrative structure. Having a different way to relate to time that is based on what we’re interested in, that can move fluidly between what is commonly considered the “past”, “present”, and/or “future” has a lot of potential. Rather than using one narrative structure to tell stories, we can tap into many different modes that we can choose from based on the situation we’re trying to understand. To use some very western examples to illustrate the point, I’ll refer to Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The Odyssey represents a kind of way that we could tell stories/communicate about time in the way that I’m describing, where the focus is more on exploring themes and patterns, using that as a lens through which to view the information from different points in space-time, weaving them all together. The Iliad, on the other hand, has a more linear structure that is how we commonly think of time in colonial societies. My aim here is to ask us to realize that there are other ways of conceiving even the most fundamental pieces of our perceptual understandings. We should explore them on our journey to destroy coloniality.
25. This is a Twi word that means “to retrieve”, and is commonly represented by a bird that is walking forward while facing backwards. It refers to the importance of not leaving useful things behind, in our case, indigenous and other cultural practices.
26. This comes from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
27. Intersectionality is a framework that discusses the ways one’s identities intersect to create unique combinations, where the location at the intersection is an emergent experience from individual variables. It is a legal-structural analytic.
28. Positionality is a framework that covers similar ground to intersectionality, but zooms into the specific experiences of specific people who exist at specific intersections. If intersectionality helps us understand how certain groups or classes of people are impacted by the way that they exist, positionality helps us understand how individuals are impacted. Both are needed (or similar frameworks) to help us apprehend people’s social lives or lack thereof.
29. See “Glossary” section for more on what it means to “devour” something.
30. I’m not convinced enough to position this as a “fact” (which I define as a truth that is true no matter what any individual says, whereas other truths can exist alongside other plausible conclusions from the same information), as the process may have looked more like a feedback loop, where higher classes (meant here as synonymous with “category”) oscillated between dominating non-human nature and dominating lower classes (vis a vis patriarchy and/or gerontocracy), using learnings from one to inform the other in a dialectical process. A more generous reading is that ecological problems are social problems, which I can get behind.
31. It’s worthwhile to say that this also may not be “literally true” in the #scientific sense. Entropy is totally a thing, and though Bookchin is skeptical of systems theory and some of the complexity sciences more broadly due to him seeing them as a mechanization of nature, I’m not sure he escapes this within his own corpus. He remains within the ideological cul-de-sac of Eurocentricity, which is the main constellation of thought currently promoting the decline of the biosphere. Regardless, I like the idea of dialectics because of the ways in which it, like I say, can be a tool for fighting oppressive regimes of thought, space, and action because it allows us to zoom out a bit, see what’s going on in a given context, and (inter-)subjectively decide how to move forward in a way that we can track, such that we’re always intending to point towards what works. That’s more important to me than Truth™️ in an abstract sense.
32. Note that this is my conception based on readings of Hegel and Marx through Complexity Theory and Bookchin. Pretty much everyone has their own take on dialectics, so other conceptions are likely to have their own particularities.
33. Its negation, or opposite. This can be literal, but the only requirement is that it is the thing on the “other side” of the contradiction, as in it is separable from the other entity being looked at. It is looking at the relationship between two elements in a system. The “nothing” is (metaphorically) rubbing up against and creating tension with the “thing” being focused on.
34. It may seem obvious that a seed will become a plant, but that isn’t pre-ordained. Dialectics helps us understand the way that elements in the universe (might) develop, both in obvious or self-evident ways, and in surprising, emergent ways, grounded in what’s possible (a seed won’t turn into a bird, for example, so that wouldn’t necessarily be a potentiality that we consider).
35. This can be a religion, culture, people, person, institution, or place. Authority figures are charlatans. Anything that we believe should be based on (an expansive sense of) evidence, rather than the deciding factor being the source of any given explanation/hypothesis.
36. Hopefully, the importance of unsettling is clear, but to reiterate: we unsettle our current world because the widespread immiseration that can be found in colonial modernity limits all who are devoured into its structure. Rather than continuing to drink from a poisoned well, I propose that we find ways to live in egoistic mutuality with our local water tables, shifting our focus towards self-interested cooperation.
37. By “find resonance”, I mean that we feel these worlds accurately describe our actions in the moment that we deploy them.
38. This the kind of reasoning you might encounter when reading any mainstream (non-radical) Western texts.
39. This is the kind of reasoning you might encounter in exploring decolonial, indigenous, and African epistemologies and philosophies, especially ones that discuss different ways to relate to reason and rationality.
40. Deterministic here refers to the linear conception of determinism which relies on 19th century understandings of physics and applied math rather than modern understandings of complexity and chaos. Lots of developments in social sciences, for better and for worse, follow developments in the natural and physical sciences, using those developments as models. The issue comes in when older conceptions that people have structural, power-based, or emotional attachments take precedence over new developments. If we think of a transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian conceptions, we can see how flexible determinism can be, beyond colloquial and archaic understandings, if we devour that idea and make it our own.
41. I tend to see leaning into ethics or morality as a way to deploy an exit hatch from the need to engage, think, and question deeply/critically. This is not to say that they don’t have any purpose, function, or utility. I find value in these when they give us the ability to act as egoists. My worry is that I see these as things that tend to make us their tools, rather than us remembering that they are meant to be helpful. If you’re defaulting to ethics as a normative rather than descriptive thing, then you are likely to be denying your desire.
42. This commitment to relationality and reciprocity is a practical commitment more than anything else. Based on my analysis, I see no reason to try and find my happiness at the expense of others — I don’t see it working like that. I’d rather not engage in violent delights that lead to violent ends.
43. This is not meant to ignore the conditions placed upon us… it is to say that there are true limits on us but through effective & collective action, analysis, and care, we can surpass those limits and become whatever we want to be.
44. If you build up social encouragement and rituals that make integral labor that is devalued in our current paradigms as ways to be acknowledged, people will start to sing a different tune towards them.
45. We are limited by our phenomenologies as to be unable to apprehend reality as it is, so abstractions create helpful models for us. Where the models lose their utility is when they take on an “objective” character, and we forget that we are not looking at the thing itself, but a sketch of the thing that doesn’t have all of the details.
46. I’d not describe Max’s work as such… but that’s a common interpretation since he is so critical of modernity and leaves the door open for what comes after. I think that to be truly and fully “negative”, in a way that creates space for creation, we have to fight capital, modernity, and coloniality.
47. It is easy to be valued based on your positionality, which can either be societally mutable or fickle depending on your social context in dangerous ways.
48. This is where the dangers of narrow ego(t)isms show themselves. If you chase short term, systems-reinforcing gains as a person who’s immiseration is what allows that system to continue running, you are condemning yourself to a life of fruitless efforts and dissatisfaction, or, even worse, damnation from success in a colonial paradigm.

Glossary

Becoming: the process of change by which a new paradigm is established for a subject or object (or phenomena), through contact between Being and Nothing (definitions below). The being meets nothing and ends up as something else though a process of becoming.

Being: a subject or object that is receiving some focus. In the dialectical process, it is our “starting point”.

Contradiction (logical): when a subject, object, or phenomena is said to have features or properties that can’t exist at the same time and be factual. For example, All apples are fruits. If someone were to say that some apples are not fruits, that is a logical contradiction, because there is no way to substantiate that claim through information, reasoning, or data. Logic is all about “internal” consistency, where the “internal” refers to the relation between the claims being made and the things being compared. Within the system of interest, in this case the “system” of fruit classifications, of which an apple is an element, the claims and conclusions should be supported by the characteristics of that system.

Contradiction (dialectical): In dialectics (or a dialectical process), contradictions can take the shape of logical contradictions, (All X are Y → Some X are not Y | No X is Y → Some X are Y) but they only need to take the shape of tensions between elements in a system more broadly. It’s all about the relationship between elements. This is why there can be both logical and dialectical contradictions in a system like capitalism, depending on what facets you’re looking at. On the logic side, for example, one of the contradictions in capitalism is how much opposition there is to reparations for Black folks. This doesn’t fit in well with the values of remuneration, fairness under the law, and things like that. This is a great showcase of how Liberalism’s values of liberty, equality, and freedom are logically contradictory with the apathetic-to-malicious nature of capitalist growth imperatives. “All people are equal under/before the law” logically contradicts with “some people are not equal (when looking at the outcomes) under/before the law”. Those two realities can’t exist at the same time and maintain internal logical consistency. This kind of realization is why paradigms like “the purpose of a system is what it does” are able to be understood. A dialectical contradiction in this context might be the ways in which enslaved folks (and their descendants) are categorically excluded from the wealth they (continue to) build for (descendants of) slave owners. Enslaved folks built wealth they can’t access, and slavers are able to reap rewards. So there is a contradiction (or tension) between the amount of labor being put in and the rewards received, which creates a fertile ground, with the potentiality for “becoming” to facilitate a new paradigm. This contradiction is dialectical and not necessarily logical because there is nothing about the reality of capitalism that prevents this from happening (though it could be logical as well, depending on our focus and how we frame the issue, like the previous example). To recap, in dialectics, a contradiction can be logical (for one statement to be true, the other can’t be true), it can refer to tensions within the relationship between two elements, where the development of that tension can lead to a new paradigm that changes the relationship between the two elements in tension, or it can be a combination of the two.

Dark power: the power that comes from positionality in a “zone of non-being”, or as “(a creative) nothing”. It is when dispossessed folks come together and create worlds not imaginable by those who are stuck in colonial positionalities and/or mindsets.

Devouring: taking (self-)ownership of something, connecting with it deeply to realize its use-value. This is a radically subjective act of taking anything you encounter and “metabolizing” it, bringing with you what’s useful and leaving what’s not. It’s the process of egoistically communizing the world around you by making the double entendre of property into a singular meaning, where the things you own are able to be utilized as if they are features of you. It’s making your properties your property.

Dialectics: a method to understand and apprehend the (potential) ways that a subject, object, phenomena, or process can change (in the developmental sense), principally by its contact with another object that engenders the need for change. Generally, we are interested in a certain thing that we’re focusing on, and the contradiction (or tension) a different “part or element of the system” creates by way of the two interacting. Multilectics would be how this process happens while looking at more than two things at the same time.

Ego: an expansive form of desire, including the emergent totality of feelings, emotions, impulses, ambitions, goals, etc, across rational, social, emotional, physical, and intuitive/spiritual vectors. The ego is always in a process of becoming, as the things one wants are never truly static.

Egoism: a unique individual’s method for fulfilling their expansive desires. This points towards being aware of and attuned to the context in which the ego resides, allowing for a kind of relationship with desire that points us towards more liberatory potentialities. It is a partisan project (if that word is applicable in an anti-political (word to Cedric Robinson) project) that biases us towards liberation through meeting our desire.

Eurocentrism: Treating European ways of relating, being, and thinking as universal & superior rather than particular. This has led to not only cultural bias, but gives shape to the global economic and social power dynamics in place, our understandings of history and science, and our philosophical outlooks on the world. This becomes a limiting factor if we allow our conceptions of liberation or social change to be grounded in the same episteme that birthed our sorry state of affairs.

Nothing: a subject or object that creates a challenge or establishes a difference in relation to another element within a system that is considered to be receiving some attention or focus. This is not our “ending point” as much as it exists in tension with Being. There may not be an “end” in this process.