Part 4 of ‘Grief & Healing Under the Capitalist Mode of Production’
In the last part, I talked about the ways that our loved ones existed in our lives and our world—ways they were present and now no longer are. These include:
The chance for other people to get to know them and be transformed through that relationship.
The ways we appreciated about how they transformed us and the world we live in.
The ways we would care for them and the world they live in.
In light of that, what might we do in the face of losing someone?
Carry on their memory for those who might care to have known them.
Carry on their good intentions—building up our lived environment, our social practices, and our institutions. We can help perpetuate what we loved about the ways that they influenced our lives and the world.
Push back on those structures and ways of life that got in the way of their freedom and self-development during their lifetimes. Building a liberated world in which they would have been able to thrive.
I suggest we take on these acts, not as clever methods to somehow deny the fact of their death; but to celebrate, reaffirm, and develop the joys of how people can be lovingly present in each others lives. We can perpetuate the ways that they cared for others and the world, and the ways we and others would care for them.
Carrying on their memory
We carry on the memory of someone for ourselves and for others who would have cared to know them. Record and write down what we know about them, get together to learn what others know about them. Think of the joy and beauty that they brought to the world, and think of how they went about the world to do so.
We can try to understand their motivations as they went through the world. Even if we may not understand their intentions now, it may click for us later. To piece this all together, we need to remember a wealth of factual details about how they acted, and around what they acted.
We can remember the ways they were free, and the ways they weren’t free. We can carry on their memory by directing our energy into creating a free world. We can be inspired by the practices of freedom which they showed us were possible, and be spurned on by our spite for how capitalist social relations held them back from experiencing a truly liberated life.
Carrying on their good intentions
They cared to do certain things and move through the world in particular ways. Aspects of their self-expression are why we love them so, and why we feel their loss so deeply. The loss of their immediate presence does not always have to mean the loss of the roles they filled in the world. I believe we should build up a world that attempts to repair the loss of the ways that they interacted with the world.
There is something that bristles here—it might appear callous, as if I’m suggesting we merely replace our complex, cherished person with facsimiles, as if doing so will let us move on and get over their loss. Not at all! It can be materially helpful for us to find other people and experiences to help partially fill in the hole that they’ve left. But if that is all we do, I expect it to have a relatively small effect on our emotional journey through the experience of loss.
I am suggesting we continue to love them, by creating systems that build, maintain, and care for the projects which they built, maintained, and cared for in their lives. In other words, perhaps with more nuance: we should try to adopt and promote the ways that we loved about how they cared for the world and for those around them—that includes how they cared for you. In that way, their best intentions may live on and have a continued effect on the world, even if they can no longer do so by their own actions. I know I would appreciate it if people did that for me.
In this way, we can also hold someone in appreciation for how they helped point out to us what they cared about. They noticed, discovered, or landed on something in the world that they thought was important. Through their words and actions, they cared enough to perpetuate, nurture, and develop particular aspects of the world, particular ways of moving through life, particular practices and institutions. With them gone, we notice holes in our world—the potential for stagnation and decay in all that which they can no longer directly help to perpetuate, nurture, and develop.
I expect that this is how we develop something emotionally fulfilling in the face of loss, without relying on the shortcut of spirituality: We ask, what would they have done if they were here? What would they have wanted? What would they have communicated to me here? What parts of their advice do I think is worth following through on? We seem to have a deep respect for people’s intentions, even after their death—it’s why we respect someone’s written will, even when they are no longer around to care whether or not it is fulfilled. Around topics like death which are so core to our human condition, I believe there are some things like our respect for our loved one’s intentions that get deeply ingrained in our psyche.
Building a liberated world with them in mind
Most of caring for someone involves wanting them to be free to develop themselves. Our world is not built in a way that particularly cares for people’s self development and agency.
After someone is dead, it may become clearer how the world kept them unfree. What were the dreams and goals that they had that they weren’t able to accomplish? What were the ways that they weren’t empowered to express or develop themselves? These are all social structures that we wouldn’t wish on the people we loved—but also which we shouldn’t wish on anyone.
We can build a better world for everyone, spurned on by our memory and care for particular people who had salient roles in our lives.
Avoiding self-harming grief
Far be it from me to know all the motivations that might lead people to commit acts of self-harm. But there is one that seems relevant here that I would like to help people avoid.
We can hold so much grief and pain inside, and it is unhealthy to keep this bottled up. As humans, I think we have a need to show our pain and care—to externalize it—to show our grief and love in ways that have material consequences in the material world.
But in the immediacy of our grief, these externalizations sometimes take on a particular self-harming quality. We may try to display the pain and harm we feel inside through a disregard to our physical well-being. In a warped way, we might think that our ‘disregard for our long-term future’ is our way of proving our love for a person or care for a cause. “I can say how much I care, but words are mere words. The only way I can truly communicate or prove my commitment is by taking actions that put my body and health on the line.”
Parts of this thinking make some sense—words are just words. It takes serious actions to dismantle the social structures that impose death and deprivation on us. It takes serious actions to build the alternative ways of living that can replace our current institutions. It takes a level of personal commitment to put our labor power toward these materially consequential actions. And as the struggle intensifies, it seems undeniable that some of these actions will involve risk to our well-being and individual futures.
But just as words are largely symbolic, there are also largely-symbolic actions. Self-harming actions are those symbolic actions that use the display of potential or actual material harm upon ourselves as symbolic “proof” of our personal commitment. On the other side of the spectrum, actions that are primarily focused on the material project of building a better world are taken on without being driven by that kind of concern about performing-symbolism-for-symbolism’s-sake.
This is not to say that words and symbolic actions cannot move people, ultimately resulting in deep material effects. We are humans, and we coordinate through words and respond to symbolism. But ultimately, idealist tactics are only effective when they can spur people to enmesh themselves in complex strategic projects to win our material needs. Effective idealist tactics are few and far between, and have diminishing returns.
We can’t change the world with mere symbolic performances. We are in desperate need of people who are ready to bunker down and do the damn work: building and testing the blueprints of a better world, while building and wielding working class power to tear down the capitalists’ institutions.
I’ll put it as clearly as I can. We should not put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of communicating our commitment or care. The way we show our commitment is by doing the hard organizing work and by measuring our success in material results.
Nor should we keep our wounds of grief fresh, for the symbolism that we still love and care for our lost loved ones. But that’s not to imply that our grief will ever truly find “closure”.
Even when we do create that better world, and when we have done the best we can—I think some amount of mourning will stay with us. We will wish that our friends could have been there to see all this progress, able to experience the joys of living in such a world. But amid our loss, we can feel joy and closeness with our lost friends by the fact that the world we have built was built with them in mind. In mind—not merely in sentiment—but in meaningful, materially consequential ways.
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We have been dealt a hand chock-full of death, disability, and irreparable harm. Even in the best future, there may be no “real closure” from these proletarian scars. We should be fucking pissed about it, heartsick that humanity has fallen down this path, and single-mindedly determined to destroy and replace the bourgeois systems which have stacked the deck against us.
When faced with this life, we can start our healing process by taking the time to feel our emotions fully. Eventually, we can trace our feelings back to the needs we have which are no longer getting met after our losses—the things that used to be with us that would make our life and society better.
We can heal from loss through our actions of building a better world—a world that carries on the memory of our lost friends and comrades; a world that carries on their good intentions and analyses about what needs changing and what is worth caring about; and a world that keeps them in mind, that they would have been able to thrive in, if they were still with us.
The only way out is through. We must win.