The fight for the future is just beginning
Biden did it, he passed the torch. Kamala Harris is now all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for President, and for better or for worse the next few months will provide a wild show for us all, at the very least. Trump & Co. seem furious, which is an upside, and he now seems more likely to lose than he did two days ago. The Democrats have raised over 50 million dollars in under 24 hours since Biden stepped aside, a staggering amount mostly powered by small donors. That number speaks to multiple enthusiasms; in part enthusiasm for Kamala, in part a renewed sense that the Dems can beat Trump now, and, I think, a mix of joy and surprise that Biden actually did the right thing and stepped aside.
But there was another event, a milestone of sorts this weekend that deserves our attention. July 20th was Octavia Butler day, as I think of it. Many of you know her books, particularly Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. These dystopian works take place in a United States ravaged by a rapidly changing climate, a decaying economy, and a collapsing government with the attendant collapse of the social contract. They are so much more than just dystopian fiction, and they are understandably known largely for their eerie prescience, most famously a Christo-fascist movement with a president whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.” The first of the pair was published in 1993, but their resurgence as the Trump years began is unsurprising. And the first chapter of that first book begins with a journal entry dated July, 20th 2024.
Now I wouldn’t argue that Octavia Butler, despite her wisdom and foresight, was writing the future exactly as it will unfold. By the time Parable of the Sower begins the collapse is significantly further along than it is here and now, in our world. Neighborhoods have built walls around them to keep the scavengers and roaming gangs out, and despite what Fox News might have to say this country is nowhere near that level of unraveling. But the trajectory that Butler warned about has been, and is, worth considering. While other dystopian works tend to veer into the apocalyptic, or take place in some far-off future so distant from our own that the lessons feel inapplicable to our lives, the Parable books are decidedly different. These books paint a plausible future, with what we all hope is some significant exaggeration. But the reader, hooked by the realism of Butler’s words, is unable to shake off the thought that the worst excesses of the societal collapse being described might just come to pass.
And yet, there is hope. The most important trajectory of the book is not the downward slide that humanity takes as the future unwinds, but instead the struggle to survive despite and through the violence and decay. Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is a young woman who doesn’t concede to what most folks in her town believe their future looks like – huddling inside their walled community until things somehow, magically, improve out there. Instead she starts a movement, a spiritual and political and ultimately powerful and species-changing movement to survive. We, I think, have a few things to learn from Lauren.
In short, we will not make it by hiding behind walls, and instead need to pursue radical transformation – right now more than ever. I want Donald Trump to lose the election, for all the obvious reasons, but a Democratic Party that wants to shut down the border, fund imperialism, and endlessly move to the right is more than incapable of meeting the moment, they will exacerbate the collapse of this country and the degradation of this planet. There is an urgency to this moment, and I don’t think there’s any point in denying that. But the importance of this election doesn’t mean we need to take our eyes off the horizon. A binary mode of thinking has been pushed again and again, namely that we just need to win this election, and then we can focus on pushing the president or organizing elsewhere or radical transformation. But the long-term vision and movement building and organizing must happen right now. Our futures, our collective future, demands it. And as the people build transformative movements and real power, we can have an increasingly genuine choice when it comes to how we exercise that power. We can, in time, make demands that we are able to enforce, instead of just, for example, hoping that the President steps down when he is no longer able to function.
This simple truth, that beating back a fascist is in fact an opportunity to build up a true movement of and from the people, instead of a time to set that aside and just focus solely on the election at hand, is often lost because the ruling class wants it to be lost. We can bring this idea back to life, and keep one eye on the horizon, on a future where radical change has become a reality, even as we keep our feet planted in the here and now. I know it’s easier said than done, and I know I’m not the first person to make this suggestion. Real transformation, real systems change, a future that is meaningfully different from the present, where profit doesn’t rule our lives and where care for one another fuels and structures our reality, can be hard to imagine, and harder to actualize. And yet, as Octavia Butler said, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Our job, now, is not just to resist, but to create. We have a world to win, and a world to build. These projects are not mutually exclusive, but instead mutually constitutive. In offering a real vision for a better society, in helping people get a glimpse of that improved future right here and now, we are more likely to win today and more likely to develop a better world together for tomorrow, free of fascism and filled with human and ecological flourishing.
P.S. Most of you good folk weren’t around when I did a little series of essays on the movement in Butler’s Parable books, Earthseed. Here is that series for anyone interested: https://www.jphilll.com/s/earthseed.
I was around when you wrote about Octavia. I read the books and have incorporated their ideas in my own work. It got me thinking about the many ways we can build a future out of despair