Read & Riot

by Nadya Tolokonnikova

  Pope John Paul II did tremendous damage to the church. Because he had this phobia against communism. That gave the church a kind of right-wing tilt, and the church in essence embraced neoliberalism. It forgot about justice. It certainly forgot about the poor. And that’s why it’s largely irrelevant, and I would say the last thing that made the church irrelevant in the United States was the rise of the Christian Right. They’re not Christians. They’re fascists.

  Christian fascists are filling the ideological vacuum for Trump. Because Trump doesn’t have an ideology other than his narcissism. And when you fuse the iconography and language of a religion with the state, it’s fascist, and that’s who they are.

  NADYA: What do you think about identity politics? Do you think they may have been co-opted by liberalism?

  CHRIS: It swiftly became co-opted. For instance, feminism. If you go back and read Andrea Dworkin and the real feminists, it is about empowering oppressed women, but feminism now became about a woman CEO, or in the case of Hillary Clinton, a woman president. Everything got twisted. An African American president who runs the empire. So as Cornel West says, Barack Obama is a black mascot for Wall Street. And the left just got seduced by it. It was just political immaturity. It was a willful severance with the poor because in marginal communities of poor people of color—they were not only losing all their jobs, getting evicted from their homes, being sent to the largest prison system in the world . . . but being shot, being gunned down right and left.

  Their court trials are a joke. There’s no habeas corpus, there’s no due process, 94 percent are forced to plead out to things they didn’t even do.

  NADYA: Because they’re scared.

  CHRIS: The students I teach in the prisons with the longest sentences are the ones that went to trial because they didn’t do it. And they have to make an example of them because if everyone went to trial the system would crash. They’ll stack you with twelve, fifteen charges, half of which they know you didn’t do. And then they get to say: if you go to trial, look at that poor guy who went to trial. I taught a guy once who had life plus a hundred and fifty-four years, and he’s never committed a violent crime. It’s insane.

  NADYA: What did he do?

  CHRIS: It was drugs and weapons possession. But he was never charged with a violent crime. But see, this is the problem: because you deindustrialize the society, you create redundant or surplus labor, who are primarily black and brown, and you need a form of social control because you turn them into human refuse. What are the forms of social control? Mass incarceration and militarized police. If you go into Newark, or Camden, or any of these poor areas in New Jersey, they’re mini police states, where you have no rights, where SWAT teams come and kick your door down in the middle of the night with long-barreled weapons, terrorizing, sometimes shooting everyone in sight, for a nonviolent drug warrant. It’s really hell. And that is about what’s going to get extended throughout the whole country.

  We’re seeing the ten thousand new police agents, the five thousand new border patrol, the 10 percent increase to the military, which they didn’t even ask for. A complete militarization of the society.

  NADYA: They didn’t even ask for it! But yeah, take it.

  CHRIS: And liberal elites are complicit because while this was happening to poor people of color, they were worrying about making sure they had their quota of LGBT people within their elite institutions.

  Everybody talks about progress in gay rights—that’s not true. It’s progress for the elites, but if you’re a gay man who only has a high school education, and you’re pumping gas in rural Kansas, you’re worse off. It’s more dangerous with the rise of the Christian Right. And those gay elites in New York and San Francisco have turned their backs on the poor. . . . And it’s not just the violence. It’s the fact that because of the power of these Evangelical churches these poor kids believe they’re impure, they’re diseased, and that’s why you have such a high rate of suicide among these kids.

  All the way around, it’s a class issue. And the neoliberal elites are complicit with the rest of the country in turning their backs on the poor, and especially poor people of color.

  Richard Rorty said in Achieving Our Country, look, this is a dangerous game. He wrote in 1998. If you have a bankrupt liberal establishment that continues to speak in the language of liberal democracy but betrays those values to your working class and your poor, then eventually, you have not only a revolt against those elites, which is what we’ve seen with Trump, but you have a revolt against those values. And that’s what’s happened.

  NADYA: How should we speak with them? Go deeper—analyze the economic situation that brought this disaster which you see right now, and Trump is just a symptom.

  CHRIS: They don’t want to hear it because they—just like all people in positions of privilege—don’t want to hear anything that challenges their right to that privilege, so what’s the reaction to the election? Russia did it! This is ridiculous. I’m no friend of Putin, but the idea that Russia swung the election, it just doesn’t even make sense.

  NADYA: I know that it is possible to change somebody’s mind because I changed my own mind and I constantly change my mind every day.

  CHRIS: I think that most people don’t get their mind changed. I think that for me the most powerful way is to build relationships with the oppressed. I was in El Salvador, I was in Gaza, I was in Yugoslavia, or here I am in the prisons, or with the book I did, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, it was two years we spent literally in the poorest pockets of the United States.

  NADYA: What do you answer to all those people who keep asking us, Okay but what is the alternative? You want to destroy things? But what do you want to put instead of that? And I’m telling them—look around, we have a lot of bright people and anybody can be better than Putin . . .

  CHRIS: Putin wouldn’t have come down as hard on you as he did if he wasn’t scared. Our job is to make them scared. Our job is to scare the shit out of them. Because that’s the only way power reacts. Politics is a game of fear. Appealing to its better nature is a waste of time, it doesn’t happen. So who was America’s last liberal president? It was Richard Nixon. Not because he had a soul or a heart or a conscience. But because he was scared of movements. Mine Safety Act, Clean Water Act—all of that came from Nixon.

  There’s a scene in Kissinger’s memoirs where tens of thousands of people have surrounded the White House in an antiwar demonstration and Nixon has put empty city buses all around the White House as barricades, and he looks out the window, and he goes, “Henry, they’re going to break through the barricades and get us.” Well, that’s where people in power have to be, all the time. I lived in France when Sarkozy was president. Sarkozy pissed in his pants every time the students came into Paris or the farmers brought their tractors into Paris.

  NADYA: What should we ask for? What will be those words that can really bring us together?

  CHRIS: I’m a socialist. I believe that most of the people at Goldman Sachs should go to prison, and Goldman Sachs should be shut down. Banks should be nationalized. Utilities should be nationalized; the fossil fuel industry should be nationalized. Yes, there are ways that you can have corruption with that as you do in Russia, but right now we’re in a situation where those industries and corporations run the country and we’re not going to break their back unless we take away their toys and their money.

  I’m not telling you it’s going to happen. I’m just telling you that the only hope we have is a revolution. A nonviolent revolution. Now, given the situation as it is in the United States and the weakness of the left and the lack of political consciousness, we’re probably far more likely to have a protofascist right-wing backlash.

  NADYA: Another question is, Can we develop a left version of globalization? Neoliberal globalization does not serve the people, but global mobility, on the other hand, is the thing that gave me everything I have. Otherwise, I would be sitting in my Siberian hometown working at the nickel fa
ctory.

  CHRIS: Right. Well, there’s corporate globalization, which is dangerous and evil. And then there’s the globalization between movements because we’re all fighting neoliberalism. We’re all fighting corporate capital.

  All revolutionary movements have fed off of each other throughout history. They come in waves. So you have the American revolution, and you have the French revolution, and then you have the Haitian independence movement.

  I think that’s right, that the only hope we have is by linking ourselves globally and not retreating into nationalism, which they want us to do.

  Rule № 9

  CREATE ALTERNATIVES

  * * *

  In addition to resistance, create unorthodox, unconventional models, mores, institutions. Revitalize your ability to dream, to envision and create alternative futures. The inability to dream makes us shortsighted. The most radical act of rebellion today is to relearn how to dream and to fight for that dream.

  * * *

  You can listen to politicians, they’ll lead you astray

  You’ve gotta see the light and you’ve gotta see the way

  COCKNEY REJECTS, “OI! OI! OI!”

  Those of us who are outside and free, we’re going to tell the truth. We’re going to be honest. We’re going to have a certain kind of moral and spiritual and intellectual integrity. And no matter how marginal that makes us, we’re not in any way going to become well-adjusted to this injustice out here.

  DR. CORNEL WEST, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH DEMOCRACY NOW!, 2016

  Words

  stay weird

  If Pussy Riot needed to define their job somehow, they’d say that their job is being ridiculous. Being ridiculous is one of the best ways to tell the truth. You don’t pretend that you know. You’re just asking, you’re wondering and suggesting. You don’t force others to build a brave new world.

  People who behave weirdly might be called sick or disabled by some, but they just might be seeing something that others don’t. Look at the Old Testament prophets, for example, who behaved like total weirdos.

  When you are ridiculous, when you tell the truth, they will say you are insane.

  Besides prisons, there are multiple other ways to turn you into an obedient domesticated pet. One of them is control through the medicalization of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry.

  Psychopharmaceuticals are overprescribed. The number of people with a diagnosis is rising exponentially, the diagnoses themselves are expanding. Anxiety, fear, and loneliness are plaguing us. Loneliness is the disease of our century—that’s what I read when I was desperately googling “WHAT TO DO ASAP DYING FROM LONELINESS.”

  We don’t really inquire about the reasons for this plague, though. We’re isolated with our problems, which we perceive as minor, personal problems. Moreover, we start to feel guilty about our anxieties and fears because they make us less productive, and we end up taking performance-enhancing drugs. Why are so many people not feeling quite well? And why is the goal of treatment to conform patients to the norm rather than to deal with the systemic issues that make millions of people feel miserable?

  What if certain socioeconomic trends are leading to this explosion of illnesses? When competition and gaining success by any means have become our ideology, should we really be surprised by this overwhelming feeling of hopeless isolation? Competitive solidarity does not exist; competitive love does not exist either. Some things are just not supposed to be competitive, things like access to solidarity, love, health care, fresh air, and clean water. However, the most powerful forces today—privatization and deregulation—are based on making everything competitive. So, if so many people feel that they are fucked and fooled, maybe they are fucked and fooled. It looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks.

  The alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments for insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to conventional bourgeois morality. That morality says that madness is mental illness, and it’s presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery. But it’s not neutral at all. Labeling those who think differently as mentally ill, force-feeding them meds, and locking them up in hospitals are part of a mighty instrument of control. As a matter of fact, it’s the most dangerous form of control—one that appears to come with the approval of science. Scientific authority is designed to make you feel small and powerless. “Scientists know better”—that’s what you’re prescribed to assume. But may I tell you something? The next time you feel you can’t argue with science, think about eugenics—eugenicists claimed their movement was a science while slaughtering millions of innocent people in its name. That’s why I have problems with experts. I don’t trust experts.

  * * *

  The antipsychiatry movement was big in the 1960s and ’70s. What’s the central idea of the antipsychiatry movement? That psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients. Classic examples: electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, and lobotomy. The antipsychiatry movement has achieved a lot, methods have changed, but it certainly doesn’t mean that civil society should just relax and stop checking what’s going on in psychiatry. One of the most worrying things today is the significant increase in prescribing psychiatric drugs for children. Big pharma is a super powerful business, and we surely need to pay attention to the many cases when drugs are prescribed just because it’s profitable for the company and doctors. Actually, it’s really confusing how few questions we ask about the origins of and reasons for psychiatrists’ labeling (which we clearly should ask).

  “A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it . . . I am then in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe.” Dostoevsky thus described his epileptic seizures to a friend. In The Idiot, his character Prince Myshkin describes his epileptic episodes and the single second right before a seizure. “What matters though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?” Myshkin felt more alive than at any other moment: “I would give my whole life for this one instant,” he said.

  The goal of the power structures, though, is not to encourage revelation, joy, and ecstatic devotion. The goal of power is to make citizens measurable and governable. Michel Foucault reveals that it’s a relatively new, nineteenth-century idea that those who behave strangely are merely sick, that they’re invalids and have to be isolated from society.

  Paul Verhaeghe, the Belgian professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis I referenced before, wrote a striking book on this explosion of psychopathologies in modern Western societies, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (2012). He writes about the psychiatric handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how every edition brings more and more disorders: “180 in the second edition, 292 in the third, and 365 in the fourth, while the latest, DSM-5, gives a diagnosis for many normal human emotions and behaviours. Medically speaking, these labels have little significance, with most of the diagnoses being made on the basis of simple checklists. Official statistics show an exponential rise in the use of pharmaceuticals, and the aim of psychotherapy is rapidly shifting toward forcing patients to adapt to social norms—you might even say, disciplining them.”

  “Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals,” writes Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born Christian anarchist. Illich wrote the iconic book Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis; The Expropriation of Health (1976), and his main point is that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” He explains, “This process, which I shall call the ‘medicalization of life,’ deserves articulate political recognition.” Drugs often have serious side effects tha
t are worse than the original condition, but because we get them from “professionals” who have (supposedly) access to the ultimate truth about our health, we believe them unconditionally. Which inevitably has consequences for us.

  Thinking about economic inequality, it’s clear that it indeed brings us lots of stress that doctors may describe as a diagnosis and make us take antipsychotics. Working-poor and many middle-income families suffer from constant financial stress, due to the increasing cost of homeownership and renting, rising prices, and stagnating salaries. A situation of chronic stress inevitably leads to a wide range of health-related issues.

  Trying to conclude everything that has been said and everything else I’ve forgotten to say—it looks like we’re living in a paradoxical situation:

  Permanent financial instability and impoverishment are literally driving us nuts.

  We pay an expensive doctor, get our diagnosis (one of millions—there is a diagnosis for everybody, for you too), and get a prescription.

  We buy costly prescription drugs, get dependent on them, become junkies, and overpay pharmaceutical companies for legal drugs till the end of our lives (or the end of our money).

  I guess an exit from this vicious cycle should be found.

  * * *

  What if sometimes, in order not to feel insane, or lonely, or sad, or fucked, you have no need to take a pill—you can find others who are experiencing the same feelings, discuss your problems, organize, and solve the problem?

  You have no money to pay back student loans—you have a right to feel sad, angry, fucked. You work all day long and have no money to pay your rent—you have a right to feel insane. But don’t take a pill; it’ll help you fall asleep but will not solve the issue.