Written remarks based on speech delivered at:

Internationalism Here and Now: Reflections on the Present-In-Struggle from China, Cuba, Iran, Italy, Sweden and the United States. Smålands Nation, Lund, Sweden February 19, 2023.

Hi I'm Annie. First I want to say thanks to everyone who made this happen, everyone here. And I want to say a special thanks to Björn, who took advantage of the happenstance fact of the group of us being in the same place at the same time, having a great conversation, and said, “We should do something. Put your number in my phone.” And that's what an organiser does. And so shout out to Björn for organising us.

Smålands (Nation) is a special place to me. I celebrated my 20th birthday here in the year 2000. It was a really fun night. It was great. :D

A bit about me: I was born in Philadelphia, in what had been in my grandparents time a modestly educated, blue-collar, working class Irish neighbourhood. By the time of my birth in 1980 the neighbourhood had been reproduced, by real estate capitalists and captured state institutions, as a Black ghetto. Which is to say I was born poor and white in a Black ghetto at the dawn of the Ronald Reagan era, in the then-richest country in the history of the world.

When I was three my family lost our home, and we took the bus to Florida to live in the garage at my Uncle Dan's. Uncle Dan was not facing homelessness, in part because he had survived been drafted to kill other poor boys in a place called Vietnam, and returned to the benefit of a Veteran's Administration home mortgage. My parents started over at minimum wage, $3.25 an hour, in a state where unions are illegal. (They call it a ‘Right to Work' state because these dudes are good at branding. We need to get much better at it, by the way.) This is all to say that I've spent my whole life following the money. And I've always been very curious about the stories that get told to justify and explain the state of things—why some have enough, some have much-much more than they need, and others do not have the basic-basics.

Presently I'm an ex-Academic, I am in recovery from Academia, having grown too weary of being Disciplined. The future is, in my case (and I hear it's going around), to be continued. In my activist life, most recently I was involved on the opioid epidemic. I did direct, mutual-aid syringe and naloxone provision and overdoes prevention training. I was also involved in a public advocate role in places like city hall, the press, and in the streets. Before that I was an active participant in Occupy Wall Street and a founding member of two organisations that came out of the Occupy movement, both of which were about debt. The first was called The Occupy Student Debt Campaign, where we promoted a pledge to withhold student debt payments. The second was called StrikeDEBT, where we joined with other groups that came out of Occupy who had been focused on other kinds of debt, namely predatory mortgages, foreclosure and eviction resistance efforts, medical debt, and other kinds of consumer debt. Our intention in all instances was to raise awareness about the extent to which debt has, in the Neoliberal American era, supplanted and substituted for the necessary wages to provision life for the working class.

Two big projects came out of StrikeDEBT. One was a book we wrote called The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual (as PDF or in print), which was a tactical guide sharing well-researched strategies on how to avoid repaying different kinds of debt with minimal, ideally no, punitive repercussions. The second was called The Rolling Jubilee Telethon, where we put on a variety show, with some really great artists and performers donating sets, and streamed it online. In the US we have this tradition of telethons to raise money for different causes. So this was a somewhat campy and rebellious take on that. With the money we raised we bought and abolished about $5 million dollars in medical debt.

Our strategy in the debt movement was to promote something like a debtor's union, a mass movement of solidarity. The idea being: if I as an atomised individual don't repay my debts, I'm fucked. But if a million of us get together and decide not to pay, you, Mr. Banker Man, are fucked. In a sense this is also my one-scene fantasy-slash-theory of revolution--building for that sweet-sweet moment when you look around and realise your gang is bigger than the gang that's holding you up. And so you just pluck the gun out of their hand, and simply flip it back on them.

And that brings me to the two points I want to raise in response to the opening prompt we've been invited to reflect on, on what it will take to build a post-capitalist, life-affirming, beautiful revolution in the United States and globally. Those two things must, by definition, go together. It's the nature of the beast that is Empire. And the nature of the dream whose name and cause has been badly slandered, communism.

I'll call it a two-point program. The first is that we need to learn how to see and identify each other, and to learn to recognise each other as potential comrades. This is to say to undo the programming that teaches us that we, the working class, are more different than we are the same and to instead unlearn and relearn a new way of seeing that allows us to identify our commonalities across these technologies of social partition that are as old as empire itself and that maintain the accumulation of capital and the individuals and power structures that benefit from it. This is of course to say categories of social hierarchy and dehumanisation such as race, religion, documented or undocumented status, sex, gender, sexuality, etcetera. These tactics are used everywhere in the colonised world, which is the Whole World, and in the United States of course, the technology of domination known as racialism and racism, chiefly among all, has been deployed to keep the American working class chasing its own tail and misperceiving each other as the enemy. It is a central tactic in the US Empire's management of its internal colony on the continent that Algonquian, Iroquoian and other Native North Americans call Turtle Island.

Point two: we need to learn to see (recognise), locate and name our enemies. There are two fronts. The first is obvious: the Christian Fascists. They're making inroads. They are on the move. They have been organising for a very long time and in the present moment their efforts, the seeds they have been planting, are bearing fruit. The networks they have been building are clicking into place at a terrifying pace. Close to my heart and at my throat in the present moment is the case of Florida, under presidential contender Ron DeSantis's governorship. We can get into it later, but in short the pace at which he and his—global—cadre are wiping out life and thriving evokes in me a terror that I feel coursing in my body now as I speak it. This group is easy to find. They're obvious. They want to be recognised.

A much more nuanced and complicated front of this project requires much more of our attention and effort in the present moment. It has to do with confronting liberalism, liberal institutions and liberal individuals with the most basic truth: there is no middle path toward the future. There is no compromise that can be struck with the powers that be. In order for life on Earth to persist and to thrive we must change everything. There is no place for the compound growth of abstracted wealth on a living Earth, and there is no way to reconcile the profit motive with socially sound intentions. The evidence is clear: capital cannot abide regulation; it subverts every attempt to tame or defang it. To be ‘unconvinced' of this fact at this moment in history, must be named what it is: Denial. There is no more time left for moral relativist, compromising reformist-reform visions for how to transcend the present conjuncture of compounding and terminal crises.

It is time, point-blank, for a culture shift, that I believe we in the United States are ready to enact. We must put to the liberals the most fundamental question that determines how we move forward: which side are you on? Liberal institutions and individuals sitting on heaps of wealth and other assets and resources must be encouraged, convincingly, to put that capital into circulation funding the already ongoing movements for beautiful, radical, life-giving collective change. There are countless projects and potential in motion that have the capacity to produce needed quantum-leaps in knowledge and practice. This must be the only return on investment that matters—learning, from the locally specified yet always global here-and-now, new and renewed ways of being human together on a living Earth.

There are a million—infinite—ways to be in the game, to be in the struggle, but one must make that active choice. There is a present imperative to take action, at the most basic level of meeting our neighbours, building community, addressing and resolving preventable harm, unmet need, and premature death in our midst. If an individual or an institution is expecting to earn interest on their inherited or otherwise invested wealth, while disavowing their responsibility to the collective, it's time to have a blunt conversation about how that money grows. The cultural shift must assert: there is no ethical basis for the expectation of exponential growth (interest) on hoarded capital in the present moment. To believe one is entitled to compound growth of their wealth is to be wilfully ignorant about how, in the present dis-order of things, capital makes more of itself.

This is meant to be both a confrontation and an opening. It is an escalation of the struggle at the level of mass culture and discourse. This is about calling bullshit on The New York Times. This is about calling bullshit on Academia Inc. This is about a gentle antagonism, a tough-love leaning-in with “good people” sitting on wealth and resources who still aren't sure what to do with it. This is about identifying and speaking to the people and institutions who are afforded enough comfort in the present to choose their position in the old, dead and dying world rather than take a leap into the unknown with the rest of us who are falling off the cliff. We must engage people directly about the problem of stagnating in comfortable discomfort. We must point out the choice being made, wilfully or not, consciously or un-, against needed and revolutionary social change. The urgency of the present means it's time to engage directly those who are content staying in a place of cynicism or idle critique, those for whom leftism or progressivism amounts to only an identitarian subculture rather than a way of being in the world. It means we correct those who are confused that being “aware” or “informed” counts as a sufficient or meaningful contribution. I'm reminded of William Blake's assertion that Passive Good is worse than Active Evil.

Active Good looks like making productive trouble. We are faced with the task of building something wholly new. To say this is a frightening prospect and a daunting project is an understatement. But it is perhaps more frightening to those who are afforded a degree of comfort in the present world dis-order than it is for those of us who have not been afforded such comforts. It is time to have this conversation directly, in our social relations and our civic institutions and everywhere else. It is my assessment that the collective consciousness is in place to force such a tipping point. It's time to flip the script. I believe we are ready, and I believe we can win.

Recommended Citation:

Spencer, Annie Xibos (2023), Remarks from Internationalism Here and Now: Reflections on the Present-In-Struggle from China, Cuba, Iran, Italy, Sweden and the United States. Smålands Nation; Lund, Sweden, February 19, 2023.