Bill Ayers and Freedom Dreams

I had the extreme good fortune of being asked to have an evening in conversation with Bill Ayers for his most recent book release, When Freedom is the Question, Abolition is the Answer.

For those who don't know, Ayers is the co-founder of the Weather Underground, a group organized in the 70s to combat US imperialism. The Weather Underground, rather famously, conducted several bombings against government targets. No casualties were incurred through these bombings as the group would frequently warn their targets ahead of time, and advise as to why the bombings took place. Ayers managed to evade arrest until prosecutorial misconduct caused the charges against him to be dropped. Bernadine Dohrn, the other founder of Weather Underground and Ayers' wife, was eventually fined and given probation. A rare case of restraint for the US government–maybe because Ayers and Dohrn are white.

Neither Ayers nor Dohrn stopped working as activists and freedom fighters. They have been on the front lines of many actions, and have been teaching and writing at the forefront of leftist thought ever since. To boot, they're remarkably kind and generous people. Having the pleasure of meeting Bill and reading his book, I thought I would take a break from the usual fare that we have here at When/If and talk a little bit about what good we can do in the world.

World-Building

Much of Ayers' new book is what one might call introductory–it's not exactly groundbreaking theory, nor is it advanced notes on praxis. But it is one quick place that you can go for a bright shot of hope. Ayers, with the resume to prove it, suggests that much of the work that we need to do as a people is to work with our social imagination to begin to dream of a better world. That sounds probably far too simple, but reading his book you'll see that this simple idea, well, works.

Ayers, along with numerous other radicals, says that we have to imagine a world in which the things we despise aren't simply no longer–they become impossible. Sitting for a moment and thinking of that kind of world by itself is a powerful thought. Imagine a world without mass incarceration, and not just that, but a world in which it's unthinkable. When talking about this particular example, I brought up Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, in which a scientist from an anarchist society goes to a capitalist one in hopes of spreading his scientific theory. Early in the novel, some anarchist children are being taught about the culture of the capitalist planet from which they originated, and are flummoxed by the idea of incarceration.

And really, it's not that wild of an idea. Many problems would be solved on the way to solving mass incarceration–housing, policing, mental and physical healthcare, education. Imagining that world brings the injustice of our world into focus, which makes you and anyone imagining along with you angry. That's motivating. Spread that motivation, and you start to create a movement. By thinking about an alternate way for the world to be, you start to change the world you're in. World-building.

The Dark Wood

Ayers talks a fair bit about the idea of freedom, as you might expect. One of the many smart things he says is that freedom–not American, single-slice-of-plastic-wrapped-cheese-freedom–involves action and opposition. I found it most impactful when he described it via negativa; if unfreedom is a border preventing the crossing of a family, then freedom is not just being able to pass through that border, but destroying the border.

Choosing freedom isn't a state of being, but a continuous state of action and opposition to unfreedom. This continuous opposition to the world that exists can be rather frightening because, even though the world we're in sucks, it's familiar. Familiarity is like inertia, which I think is particularly relevant to Americans, most of whom, I would expect, felt rather comfortable in their little corners until quite recently–if not even now. It takes effort to break out of familiarity, and working into the unknown is of course not without its own possible dangers.

This is the dark wood: pursuing freedom means taking that path into the unknown, in which you must take responsibility for your choices and actions rather than fall back on the ways the world has fucked you as an excuse. And that's, of course, scary. But we can't move forward with the baggage of capitalism on our backs.

Freedom

Reading Ayers' newest book, I was often a little discouraged by the lack of concrete action recommended. But he mentions concrete actions taken for certain issues, such as mass incarceration, and he of course has implemented concrete actions longer than you and I have been alive–so to exclude them is not to say they aren't possible or haven't been invented. This isn't a book written by someone who's spent their life just thinking.

So when Ayers writes a book about freedom and abolition, you know he's literally done the work. And it's worth it to take a break from studying the collision-course of our fascist government and the climate crisis to see what can be done through the cracks in both. It's scary to do more than just watch, but it's worth it when we imagine the kind of world we could potentially create out of this mess. It will be hard–there's no doubt about that. It's probably damn near impossible. But the alternative is just a worse world in which we didn't try–so isn't it worth it to think about something different?