Rattling Our Chains:
Haunted by a Fear of Freedom
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” – The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx.
“’I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’” – Jacob Marley in A A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens.
It is often said, in varying ways, that if ghosts could impact the material world, then Empire would have fallen long before now. The victims of slave patrols and militarized police, the martyrs of colonizer bombs and settler blockades, vastly outnumber the Empire’s footsoldiers. Revolutionaries of all ages, and their children, are legion among the dead, slaughtered in waves. The monument-like, stone-cold tyrants who preserve the status quo seem to live forever; the seats of power are held by those whose values were shaped nearly a century ago. They are rarely replaced, and they are few.
Oppression is spectral. That is, it appears on a visible spectrum. On one far end of the chain, there are those whose existence does not and cannot oppress anyone else, and they bear the full weight of every kind of oppression. On the other end of the chain, there are those who are not and cannot be oppressed by anyone else, untouched by any kind of oppression. And the vast majority of us fall somewhere in between, oppressed in some ways, oppressive or at least complicit in oppression in others. Wrapped in chains that we pull while being pulled, whether we want to or not. In A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley admits after his death that during his life he had willingly chosen bondage to what we now call “the grind,” for the status it gave him above others. He chose to oppress people in order be a little further up the chain. In that story, the weight of the chains he dragged in the afterlife were proportional to his wealth.
When Marx spoke of the proletariat’s chains, he was speaking of a workforce that was very deeply, and relatively newly, exploited. The pittance they were given in exchange for their labor wasn’t worth the time, energy, and value of their skills that they could save by not working for capitalists, instead growing their own food, building and maintaining their own homes, providing for their own subsistence. What’s more, Marx believed workers could have all the benefits that capitalism promised, such as more efficient and abundant production that freed individuals from having to do every kind of self-sustaining labor on their own – but instead of submitting to exploitation by an owner-class to make that possible, they could just organize themselves collectively and democratically, deciding together how to meet everyone’s needs. This idea, that the boss needs you, but you don’t need the boss (as it was irreverently phrased during the Paris uprising of May 1968), was possessing Europe when Karl Marx first published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In fact, A Christmas Carol was published only five years earlier, and Dickens himself contributed to the outcry against deepening poverty brought by the industrial revolution. Marx said of Dickens that he "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together." George Bernard Shaw later said that Dickens was more seditious than Marx himself. Perhaps it was Dickens’ ghost story that inspired Marx to begin his Communist Manifesto with the line: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.”
How much can a spectre, or a ghost, impact the material world? We look at pieces of writing like The Communist Manifesto, or even A Christmas Carol, and think ideas and stories are what change the world. Ideas, stories, and truth-telling are indeed powerful, but sometimes we forget that they are capturing something other than just thought. They are taken from the lived realities and actions of everyday people. We know that Dickens was describing the social conditions he saw around him and offering his social commentary on it, but we think of Marx as being “above” mere description and opinion. We think of theorists proposing solutions to social problems from the genius of their own mind alone, when in fact Marx himself was also describing an already-existing reality, that there were people resisting early capitalist exploitation and organizing themselves differently.
To be a writer is to die for stretches of time and then return from the dead. One cannot live whilst writing, or barely. It is easy to forget one has a body while writing. And so, in order to stay alive and to have anything worth writing about, you have to live very intensely while not writing. You have to make sure that you leave your writing-place, for food and sex and sleep and washing and every sort of bodily need. Writing itself was probably one of the most effective tools that colonizers had to encourage a useful separation between body and spirit. To become educated enough to be able to write, and then eventually to have “white-collar” jobs, is to be as removed from physical labor and bodily sensation as you can be. And we’re all writers now, aren’t we? “Content creators” of one kind or another, doing the labor of sharing ideas and stories, hoping that it makes a change. Most of the changemaking we imagine doing involves raising our voices, having conversations, sharing information, telling the truth. Words, words, words… the sound of our chains rattling as we become ghosts, spending more and more time in the aether of the ‘net, disembodied spirits roaming pages, the page our primary landscape.
The separation of body and spirit has been the death of us. Wage labor, and the drive to sell off our futures through deeper and deeper debt toward an education that is supposed to improve our chances in the lottery to attain more comfortably white-collar jobs, has been the death of us. The pallor of death spreads and spreads, the whiteness of pages, the whiteness of collars. All of us middle-of-the-chain oppressed/oppressors infected by whiteness, we hold fast to our chains because what will we have to rattle without them? How can we ever be heard otherwise? No one listens to a silent ghost. The more and heavier our chains become, the louder we believe we can be. So, we reason that we need to invest ever deeper into this soul-separating, death-bringing system in order to change it from within. We’ll shake and rattle until all the way up the far end of the chain, the Scrooges of the world will cry uncle; we’ll spook them into wailing, “I’ll change! I’ll change!”
But we’re wrong. They don’t cry or wail. They don’t change. Either we cannot grasp enough chain to have any pull, or the Scrooges of the world no longer fear the rattling chains of ghosts.
A recent Princeton University study showed that public opinion has virtually no impact on political processes. “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” – Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics. Only the top 10% of income earners had any chance of making an impact, using their money to buy lobbyists or throw the weight of nationally significant business interests around. The money of the bottom 90% of income earners has no significant direct impact on policy, even if we are able to get corporations to feel some of our power with a boycott.
The feeling of being ignored no matter how desperately and loudly you are shouting has been known and felt by every descendant of a colonized ancestor haunting a nation that doesn’t want to be reminded of its genocidal and enslaving roots. Those of us who began our lives further up the chain of oppression simply because our ancestors were allowed to own land, even if we carry nothing that feels like “wealth” now, have been accustomed to being heard. When we ask to speak to the manager, the manager has normally tried to appease us instead of calling security (whether that manager is a business owner or a Congressperson). Our voices and dollars having no impact at all feels new. At least, when I was first part of the antiwar movement, weak as it was following 9/11, we knew that we weren’t successfully stopping the war on Afghanistan because we were so small and isolated. It’s a very different picture to have the streets filling with protesters week after week and month after month, disrupting traffic, sitting in Congressional offices, showing up outside the private homes of lawmakers, shutting down weapons manufacturers and blocking shipments, and still having virtually no influence on our political leaders, including a President who bypasses Congress to bomb several SWANA countries without an official declaration of war and who provides continuing aid in the billions to “Israel” to commit genocide even while under investigation for such crimes.
It is clearer than ever that rattling our chains is not enough, and that we have to release the illusion that we can manipulate our chains in ways that will set us free. No matter how much money we ever make, philanthropy will not solve this. No matter how much status we may ever have as an artist, entertainer, or social media influencer, culture will not solve this. Still, we hold on to the chain, not just because of a false belief in the power of money and status for anyone other those at the top, but also from fear.
Marx might have said that those at the bottom of society have nothing to fear from losing their chains. The further up the chain, the more fear there is of what freedom would mean. Even in the middle of the chain, people fear what will happen if the chain of oppression were removed – even if we know intellectually that removing it would free the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Every oppressor has feared that the freedom of those they’ve oppressed will mean revenge, fantasizing themselves as the victims of everything they themselves have done. There’s a fear of others’ freedom, but also of our own, deeply embedded in the DNA of my European ancestors. My ancestors’ mantras have been “Just following orders” and “I did what I had to do to survive,” when “survival” was only a challenge because they violently implanted themselves on land that wasn’t theirs. Inherent in freedom is accountability, and that’s the fear: having to responsible for doing harm. If revenge doesn’t kill us, then the shame of what we’ve done will, so it’s easier to never be free enough to find out which will hurt more. Addressing this fear of freedom is just as important as recognizing that, as Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.” Not only must we stop coveting the illusion of the usefulness of the chain, but we must also stop fearing what we will do and be without it.
Many of us spiritual folk know, deeply and intuitively, that the antidote to fears and illusions is embodiment, and grounding. We know that we need to heal the separation between body and spirit, and reinhabit our sensual being so that words, beliefs, and ideas are not the primary landscape of our lives. Healers have been at the forefront of this much-needed reconnection with the body and the land. There are wonderful people doing somatic work (Accountability Mapping is one of my favorites), and some love-and-light types teaching embodiment practices that are entirely disconnected from collective liberation work. However, not all of us are here to do healing work. Or rather, there are many parts to play in healing, and not everyone can be the balm or the stitches; some of us will need to be the scalpels.
If we cut ourselves and each other free from the chain of oppression, then what will be our connection to the material world instead? Returning to our bodies after we’ve experienced being ghosts who can’t seem to affect material reality no matter how we groan might look like the reanimation of a corpse. Certainly, becoming a threat to the existence of that chain will ensure that we are seen as monstrous. And what might it look like to embody monstrosity, to become revenant, to identify as a threat? That is what we will explore in this essay series on monstrosity.
If you don't want to miss the next installment, be sure to subscribe and get it delivered right to your inbox. This series covering ghosts, possession, zombies, vampires, and other monsters will take turns with other essays related to astrology and Tarot, all with a political bent. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with your networks or a friend!
Thanks,
Lane
IG: @leftlanesmith
Your writing always makes me feel closer to truth & creativity. Very much looking forward to this series!