In A Certain Light, Wouldn’t Nuclear War Be Exciting?
I study how teens learn about civics, but recently, I find myself wanting to consume less and less news. Every latest act of Trump’s political theater feels like a slap in the face, a choke hold– a reminder of my suffocating insignificance in face of the historical institutionalized monsters of white supremacy, patriarchy, oligarchy, colonialism. Etc. Etc.
Sometimes a slap in the face can feel therapeutic. If you ask for it. If it’s done with love. But headlines these days make me feel violated, spit and stomped on by men who have no love, no regard for me, for the people.
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We are so fragile. We’ve trusted too much. We believed in continuity. Like kids who think their parents can’t get divorced. Will never die.
Guess what, kid.
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I decide not to submit. I save my attention, my body, my energy, for life. For joy. For art. I draw a sacred circle of protection around myself and my loves, and say a little prayer to the universe. Since I became vegan, I feel like the universe and I have a more direct communication channel with each other. A clear signal, like the transmission pipes are less clogged with death.
I burn some sage and ask the universe for post-capitalism.
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The thing I learned growing up in Russia in the early 90’s: No political system is ever final.
I was beginning grade school when the Soviet Union ended. I remember standing in a long line with my mother, waiting to privatize our apartment from the state. The government allotted it to my parents— a standard family unit for a standard family unit. They didn’t have much choice or voice in selecting the neighborhood, or anything else for that matter. To each according to his (standardized) needs.
After perestroika–the rebuilding– there was much less waiting and more choices. We got our first house phone in 1994. We started buying Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice at the import store. Gel pens, Barbie dolls, yogurt in plastic cups. I still remember the day I saw my first dubbed tampon commercial, announcing its elegant solutions to problems I didn’t even know to anticipate.
I remember having to replace the currency, like getting new game pieces for a new game. Pictures and busts of Lenin came down and up went posters of American movie stars, billboards for resort vacations and silky skin.
To each according to his (suggested) wants.
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I actually don’t know how to pray. My atheist scientist parents did not teach me. Is praying a survival skill?
I improvise. Once, I sent a prayer for love up with a red helium balloon. Today, I use a Google form. I send the universe an electronic wish that goes into a perpetual spreadsheet. “Post-capitalism, please.” I figure it’ll get there somehow, through the cloud.
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Every year, I host a dinner at my apartment and invite guests to experience my traditions. I like sharing the foods: pelmeni made using papa’s family recipe, pickled tomatoes, some complicated cake eaten with tea. But most of all I like to share the culture of Russian toasting. The dinner sprawls into hours of snacking and shot-taking, punctuated with ritual breaks to tell an elaborate anecdote with an invariably ironic punchline. I have a jar of these toasts I’ve collected over the years, translated into English, and I invite my guests to read them.
Here’s one:
One man asked his friend: Why do you wear shoes two sizes too small?
His friend replied: I do it deliberately. My wife is ugly. Also, evil, and a poor cook. My son is a failure in school. My Mother-in-law is a witch. The only joy in my life: coming home in the evening… and taking off my shoes. Let’s drink to that in the New Year we have other joys!
The subtext of the joke is that sometimes you actually couldn’t get shoes your size, so you bought whatever size was available. Soviet masochism is a compulsory acquired taste. The point of toasting to it, though, boils down to a hopeful moral: everything sucks and is terrible, but sometimes we have small bits of relief and freedom from all this heavy, cold, dirty, exhausting life. Friendship. Collective intoxication. Moments of pleasure no one has allotted for you. Like taking off a pair of too-small shoes. Like drinking leisurely with good company, over a table of plain foods dressed up with canned peas and parsley into an image of holiday opulence. A private treat.
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I love sharing a meal and a wandering conversation. I love to get a little inebriated on whatever and laugh. I love an excuse to dress up, to clean up, a chance to dance.
The thing you feel when you’re at a good party, connecting with strangers and friends is: Some things can’t be taken away from us.
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But of course they can. Our parties can be taken away from us. We are not safe even in our sanctuaries. There are no real private spaces, not when we’re always on the internet. My friends migrate to Signal, but we still just talk about our families and jobs.
Maybe it’s good to feel less safe. To not trust in the future so much. I want less trust and more hope. I want less fighting back and more building. I want to build the wall of the future and I want capitalism to pay for it.
Why not?
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Actually I want to build an app. Sneak post-capitalism into your pocket.
On OKCupid, I am ranked as less wholesome and more adventurous than peers in my demographic. I have a feeling it’s because I responded to the question In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting? with a “Yes, it would.”
If you’re interested in dating me, you should know that, in a certain light, I’m the kind of girl who is Anti-Nuclear Family but Pro-Nuclear War.
Not really. Nuclear War is scary and terrible, and I want none of it, I am terrified of the possibility. But anxiety and excitement are just different appraisals of the same emotional arousal (right?). When something really scares me, I try to think, how might this be useful? What could I learn here? How can I turn a threat into an opportunity?
So what if nuclear war means the potential destruction of the majority, but not all, of our current social, institutional and political structures? Imagine an apocalypse that allows some things to survive, to have enough resources to start over, but not enough to reproduce the current system as it exists today. Imagine a planetary reboot; like when you restart your computer and it works faster, and feels like all the oppressive open windows don’t have to oppress you any more. Sure, maybe you lost that important file you’ve been working on for weeks, but you also have permission to forget the stale projects, your prior commitments; start with a clean slate. A system re-start. Imagine the creative license to make something new.
Death. Rebirth. Transformation.
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My parents tell me to not worry about opening an IRA account. Go travel, they say. They say, you never know.
The thing you learn being a post-soviet immigrant is to see a sociopolitical structure and know: This is not the only way it must be. This is not how it always was. It’s not how it always will be.
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When something really scares me, I try to neutralize it by narrativizing. I make metaphor.
Nuclear war. Nuclear energy. Nuclear power. Nuclear family. A nucleus.
A nucleus is the central and most important part of an object, movement, or group, forming the basis for its activity and growth.
What is the nucleus of capitalism, its core activities?
1) The free market as organizing principle, site for social interaction, our culture’s primary metaphor. (Colonization of human relations)
2) Human energy measured in wage labor, exploited for profit. (Colonization of time).
3) Predatory creation of new markets; the commodification of non-commercial life. (Colonization of private spaces and privatization of public spaces.)
4) Finally, the financialization of everything, especially our futures. (Colonization of dreams).
I don’t need to tell you these things. You probably know better than me. Or do you? Do we think about this enough?
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Maybe I’m more hole-some; I am but a humble donut. My political nucleus is empty, because the available ones don’t fit. I have to grow it.
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A nuclear reaction happens when a nucleus is bombarded with an energetic particle, such as a proton, neutron or high-energy electron, from outside the atom, from another nucleus. A nuclear reaction is an attack on the core activities by other core activities that fundamentally transforms these core activities.
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Gulu asks, what would you do if you knew the world would end tomorrow?
Here’s what I would do: I would have a party. I’d invite the smartest, most interesting, wildest people to come celebrate, feed each other good food, tell jokes, dance-rage joyfully into a collective effervescence. And in the center of it — at the nucleus — start making a plan for the world after tomorrow. After this world.
This is what we (my people, my dreamers, as well as legitimate political scientists) imagine post-capitalism to look like:
1) We divorce wages and sustenance from labor. We declare leisure time a human right, made possible by Universal Basic Income and technological automation. We do less with more.
2) Time is spent on joyful, collective cultural productions; people come together based on their joint needs, interests and skills to develop creative solutions to social and environmental problems. Other times collectives produce enthralling ambitious expressions of their inner selves, their dreams, our local communities. Some of the first questions post-capitalists ask are: how do we free ourselves from chronic pain? How do we provide the most nurturing and stimulating childcare and the most vibrant eldercare? How do we honor and celebrate the end of life experience? How do we sustain the earth? Our collective governing bodies support these initiatives with capacity building funds and collaborative design spaces. We care less about innovation, but innovate more ways to care.
3) We un-center the market, but don’t forget the rules we’ve made up for it. People do things for self-interested benefit. They are not free to refuse that which gives them the most pleasure. So we create social and economic rewards for the behaviors we want to see in the world. We incentivize creative production and collective action; but discourage profit for profit’s sake. We give resources and rewards for creative projects that benefit and evolve the system, based on principles of networks and sharing. From each according to what they feel like. To each according to what they’re up to.
4) We embrace cyborg corporeality. Rid of the concept of disability, everyone has different superpowers and distributed minds. We mutate until we ourselves are post-human. We bio-hack. We fuck with gender until it fragments into tiny shards. We mix race until the word doesn’t make sense anymore. We absorb animal spirits for aesthetics and stamina. We make drugs that work like photoshop. We abandon previously permanent categories and invent new terms that are liquid and temporary. We become better, smarter and even more variable.
5) We liberate the 1%. The rich are suffering in their fearful attachment to the world’s resources. They would be happier and more self-actualized if they were less burdened with controlling all the wealth. We are compassionate. We want to help. We make a business plan for the re-distribution. We present them with the contract. We say, your friends have already signed on. Shh. Everyone will be okay.
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I pray the only way I know how. I write.
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Post-capitalism doesn’t mean we reject or give up capitalism. We upgrade it. We make it self-aware (=POST), enlightened, mindful; we prescribe it meditation and journaling, a plant-based diet; we make it collectively oriented; we stop worshipping the individual, and instead focus on the win win win.
W(in)W(in)W(in).POST-CAPITALISM.US
I’ll buy the domain name and we can turn in into a shared Pinterest board of our collective imaginations. So what if it doesn’t turn out as pretty as we want. Let’s get inspired!!!
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In a certain light, even if I don’t survive the hypothetical Nuclear War, I want to die carrying the seed of an alternative future. I want to program the present chaos with tomorrow’s Operating System. I want to grow the nucleus whose particles will collide with capitalism’s. Tomorrow. Next year. Already, a little, today?
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You are already living it. Every party you host or attend. Every activity you do for joy rather than income. Every boundary your blur, queer, un-fix. It’s the most important thing you do. Kindle the fire. Feel it. Believe. Say its name. And then, when the time comes…
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DANCE DANCE DANCE DREAM DREAM DREAM COLLIDE COLLIDE COLLIDE WIN WIN WIN
BE THE PARTY YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.
BE THE PROTON YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.
