Palliative activism, or Fighting for justice without hope
The spirit within me wearies. I see each day pass another by, forever in want of change. I see the skies fall by a few inches each day. The latches holding it have ruptured under the weight of our selfishness. A suffocating smoke fills my lungs. I feel the nausea, the dizziness. I don’t write this as mere hyperbolic prose; I often have to lay in bed, a pit in my stomach, at unpredictable times of the day because I am scared shitless by what tomorrow will bring and struggle to imagine anything further away.
Is it depression? Perhaps, and yet. How do I fight a despair that seems so reasonable? A few years ago, my mother asked for my wishes for the new year. I told her candidly of my wish not to get stabbed. Neo-Nazis armed with knives had been hanging around queer bars in Montreal. Usually optimistic to a fault, I saw on my mother’s face a nod of resigned agreement. My answer to her had been half-considered, not quite in jest yet not quite earnest. In truth, only with her response did I feel the full weight of my fears. Little has changed since; as I write, far-right rags have had a few good weeks of running articles targeting me for saying something about how gendering animals normalizes bioessentialism. Their comments, an ode to my inhumanity. I should stop reading them, but I have a perverse fascination with others’ revulsion. Maybe if I acquaint myself with their contempt, it can no longer take me by surprise. But worry not — for every person who wishes me dead, two will put pronouns in their email signature. Biweekly declarations of empty support as I read the morning news of yet another frantic attempt to excise trans lives from society.
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. We, trans communities, are not the only ones targeted — far from it. Society is imploding. Witness the dismantling of the welfare state and the semblance of any social net. The ruthless exploitation of land and workers, the brutalities freely dispensed to those Black and Indigenous people who dare exist before the eye of a militaristic police. Over the horizon, if you squint a bit, you can see the downfall of civil and human rights at the hands of demagogues and populists. And if that was not enough, our little grassy ship through space is on fire. A climate crisis, approaching with unshaken determination. Choose your poison; there is no happy ending.
Once, I had hoped that my dearest communism would arrive in time to save us from despondency. Alas, I fear the demise of capitalism will not come to pass. Overcoming greed, endless consumption, and so-called merit; abolishing poverty and inequality — pipe dreams from more naïve days of mine. The promise of revolution is not one I see in the future. Not in time to save humanity from the climate apocalypse. Only barely have we sacrificed our comforts to survive a pandemic. Survive… at least seven million did not. How foolish would it be to think ourselves capable of collecting our forces and beating back planetary warming, so affectively distant it is, against the prodigious authority of capital, forever hungering for its own expansion.
Those who resist with a voice loud enough that power takes notice will be met with violence unbecoming. Among the greatest threats to racial capitalism was the Black Power Movement. And so was Fred Hampton assassinated by agents of the state as his girlfriend lay in bed next to him. Some fifty-two years ago, his death — revolutionary movements no longer pose a threat. The brutalities of the police against those who protest its violence are for its own amusement and delight. The police is now militarized, and the military equipped with hi-tech toys of mass destruction. Never has the disparity been greater between the soldiers of capital and the people. If there was ever a time for revolutionary movements to succeed, it lies in the past.
In truth, conspicuous violence rarely needs be resorted to. Capitalism has perfected the ability to quash threats to its sovereignty. The tools of ideology turn the pressure valves, let off just enough steam for the pipe not to explode. Leaders and elites at the margins can be assimilated and brought into the fold, dead or alive. Their revolutionary thought, if they have any, can be sterilized and turned into a marketing strategy. If all else fails, give them a professorship. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote about how great revolutionaries were made ‘hip’ among the liberal elite:
After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
There is nothing worse for a movement than its co-optation by capital. Capitalism has had some hundred years since to polish its ideological stratagems. Their sophistication is without rival. Martin Luther King Jr. has become an idol of white liberals. Seamlessly, quotes from Malcolm X are deployed to criticize radical Black voices. The legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are turned into soundbites before our eyes, to be used by reformist trans movements and their middle-class ex-military leaders. Today, even Justin Trudeau is an intersectional feminist — taking a knee at a Black Lives Matter event and tweeting his sorrow at the mass graves of Indigenous children just before signing off on another pipeline or appealing a court ruling that requires his government to finance healthcare and education for Indigenous youth. Oh and of course, how mightily unconcerned does he seem about the lack of clean drinking water on reserves. But don’t worry — he gets it.
Radicalism has become little more than a spectacle. A brand, a marketing strategy, an aesthetic. Like punk when I was young; all it took was a spiky belt and an album with the parental advisory tag — no matter that this little frenchie kid could not understand any of the lyrics. Radicalism is no longer a matter of feeling, compassion, or commitment, but one of appearances. I do not mean to deny the profound affect that underlies the unyielding pledge of many leftists. But you cannot organize a revolution if you do not know which of your comrades will remain at your side past the first sign of strife. With hashtags and Pepsi ads, we have been disarmed. O hope, how I wish you could still be mine to bear.
Every so often, I wake up crying from a dream of pregnancy. Crying, because I will never experience a burgeon of life taking form by my stomach, growing in the nook between my ribs and pelvis. I would be stunning with a baby bump. But on this wretched earth, my prayers are being reshaped, torn into gratitude. Never will I be the cause of another’s existence. Perhaps it is a blessing, so beset am I already with worries for the younglings in my life. Death sounds peaceful — a thought I caught myself thinking a few days ago, for the first time in a decade.
How do you live in a world that can never be repaired? How do you resist when you are too exhausted to dream of a future? Far too often have I daydreamed of giving up, of fleeing to the forest, to live in a small cabin of pine and cypress hidden in the depths of a valley. In flowing dresses and crowns of flower wreaths, there to dance barefoot on the twigs and needles with my girlfriend, in between gathering berries and logging wood. An impotent dream, I must concede. Between boredom, guilt, and the early onset of osteoporosis should I dare renounce pharmaceuticals, I wouldn’t last long. Outside, November — I prefer the city.
Not long ago, I began to play with an idea in my head. What if I conceived of activism as a palliative endeavor, rather than one guided by a utopic end? In palliative care, living past illness is no longer the goal. Something of a ritual, and much of a prayer. Its goal is to ease pains, like a balm after the sun; to cultivate comfort and love among the suffering. How do you help in a world of fire? What do you do when you run out of water? Cuddle and fuck. Aren’t the flames pretty? Let them set the mood. Suck dick. Eat pussy. Build a bookcase. Write a poem for the friend you’re crushing on. Kiss your lover under a rain that pours like nails from heaven; leave your damp clothes on the floor and shower with your bodies held together for warmth like mousebirds. Love one another — because the world sure fucking won’t. Palliative activism is a joyful or, at least, content pessimism. Maybe even an optimistic fatalism. Or fatalistic optimism — I don’t know what words mean anymore. If we are doomed to suffer, maybe we can ensure that there will be love among the suffering.
An outgrowth of my hopelessness, in palliative activism I would give up my hopes for revolution and justice, replacing them with comfort in the now-and-then. Like revolutionary struggle, its progenitor, palliative demands change — yet its demands are not in the hopes of crafting one day a just future but to reduce the pain and injustices that so many carry unto the end of days. If you are still capable of hope, then hope — I envy you. But I must figure out how to go on when weariness cuts you bare. No, I don’t want to give up on systemic change, nor turn away from justice — I want to hold and cradle them in my arms, warm them, hold them close to my heart — but I know this won’t do anymore. Not without faith. But perhaps I can hold onto them if I approach with a mind toward harm reduction rather than a teleological attitude that besets me with unkindness.
To reduce suffering and hold each other in kindness and care is still an activism. Giving up cannot be palliative; nor can liberalism. We do not diminish misery — at least not well — by helping only those most privileged among us. Even if the revolution never comes, liberal reformism cannot be squared with the materialism of palliative activism. A wish for life, not formalities, not rights for the rich marginals. And besides, you and I both know that there is no fun in kissing up to the powers that be. Their asses aren’t that soft. Pleasure lies in the fight. May the bridges we burn offer warmth and comfort — we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
What would I do differently if this decade were my last? My eyes set on revolution, I have often found anger in my bones and the kindness disappeared from my voice. Too often have I sought to be right rather than kind. Too often have I lacked kindness toward myself, wallowing in the infinite guilt of… perhaps I could have done more. More, and perhaps we could have had our revolution.
Wishing revolution has erected a barrier against my enjoyment of the world that remains. Feu Lauren Berlant called these hindering desires ‘cruel optimism.’ Cruel optimism appears when the object of your desire — say, communism — becomes an obstacle to your happiness and flourishing. Cruel is the optimism that seeks happiness yet inhibits it.
My palliative activism is a bittersweet response to the cruel optimism of revolution. It cultivates the ephemeral bubbles of love and community. It invites us to surrender to the love and care we can foster. It holds space for being wrong, for being flawed, for redemption. I have been unforgiving of imperfection, though negligible its harms can sometimes be, for want of revolution. But the revolution is not at stake; I am no longer able to dream of perfection. How about we cut ourselves and each other some slack? How about we refuse to let idealism get in the way of our present needs, present loves, present communities? We are not disposable.
Palliative activism begins where grief turns to wisdom, and wisdom to care. It carves its roots in the (post-)erotic entanglements of anarchic love, surges from those abandoned moments where we dare care for the wounded bird within ourselves. Because refusing the banality of cruelty, refusing to be worn bare, refusing to do violence unto each other — these may damn well be the closest we will come to revolution.
Maybe I am too far gone to hope anymore. But, for solace, there may still be hope.
This essay is an excerpt from Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body (CLASH 2024). Florence Ashley (they/them) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre.