by
Lea Ypi
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When those working in the port heard that they were about to lose their jobs, they began to visit our house in the early hours of the morning, waiting patiently outside until my father left. At first, there were only four or five, but as news of the structural reforms spread, the crowds grew bigger. They stood in the courtyard until my father appeared at the door, then shouted at him, begging him to think twice: “Good morning, boss. You’re a good man, boss, don’t do it, don’t listen to them thieves.” “Is it about drinking, boss? Is it that? I can quit drinking tomorrow, if that’s the problem. Tomorrow I can quit drinking, and I can quit smoking too, if you want. Who has money for raki these days? I’ve cut so much, boss, really cut down, you know.” “I only have a couple of years until retirement, boss. Just two more years. I’ve worked in the port since I was thirteen.” “Boss, I never stole anything. You know, they say Gypsies steal everything. Maybe someone told you I stole from the warehouse. I’ve never stolen a penny, boss. I swear on my children’s heads, I’ve never stolen anything.” “Let me do my job. I like my job. It’s a hard job, but I like it. I know everyone in the port. The port is like my house. I sleep there, I eat there, I do everything at the port. When I go home, my children are sleeping.”
:(
When confronted with the same decisions about structural reforms, his colleagues became cynical. “Oh, well,” they would say. “We survived the Turks. We survived the Fascists and the Nazis. We survived the Soviets and the Chinese. We’ll survive the World Bank.” He was terrified of forgetting what that survival had cost. Now that he was safe, now that our family was no longer at risk of being killed, imprisoned, or deported, he was anxious that he might soon no longer remember what it was like to wake up in the morning and worry about what the day would bring. He tried to recall the names of all the people who worked in the port, even though there were hundreds of them. “If I forget their names, I will forget about their lives,” he said. “They will no longer be people; they’ll become numbers. Their aspirations, their fears will no longer matter. We will only remember the rules, not those to whom they apply. Only think about orders, not about the purpose they serve. That’s probably what the Mule thought as she informed on her pupils’ families. What Haki repeated to himself when reaching out for his torture instruments.”
EACH YEAR, I BEGIN my Marx courses at the London School of Economics by telling my students that many people think of socialism as a theory of material relations, class struggle, or economic justice but that, in reality, something more fundamental animates it. Socialism, I tell them, is above all a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.
MY STORIES ABOUT SOCIALISM in Albania and references to all the other Socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba—there was nothing Socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends’ socialism was clear, bright, and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody, and of the past.
And yet, the future they sought, one that Socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But, to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by the failure of these ideas to be realized. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it.
In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.
California is also, however, the site of real people's homes. Real people's lives. Real lives begun as dreams and perhaps dribbled into boredom. Or unraveled into nightmares. Or fabulously, miraculously achieved. This schism - between what California represents in popular imagination and what it is, what it means to live there, to be from there - means Californians collide constantly with the rupture of existence.
How to dream the life we are already living.
the first para is kinda irrelevant but i like the subject
[...] Paradise is burning at the heart of the largest wildfires in California's long and storied history of fires. The thick smoke, which blankets the entire region for hundreds of miles, contains the particulate remains of Paradise. It occurs to me that in unison, millions of us are inhaling the sofas and ottomans of Paradise, the cars and gas stations of it, the trees and lawns, the clothes and detergent, the wedding pictures and divorce papers, the cadavers. [...]
What a strange world. You're in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You're raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can't do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. [....]
fuckk
inspo for hazel?
[...] he'll ask how I'm doing. I don't ask how he's doing because I know how he's doing. He's doing homeless in Los Angeles for five years. He's doing sleeping in a box. Instead I ask if he needs anything - a blanket, food, money. There's always a pause before he tells me he's fine. I ask if he's sure and he assures me he's sure, and then me and this packaged voice in the dark wish each other goodnight.
And while I haven't always ignored it, I can usually tell what's in my head and what's outside of it, which voice in the dark is imagined and which is real, but why I'm in here and he's out there, I'm not sure I can tell. Why my box is bigger than his.
kinda inspo (the last line) - N