Discussion with Ricardo Levins Morales hosted by Autumn Brown at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, February 6, 2025. In Ricardo’s first ever book event, he reads from and discusses The Land Knows The Way: Eco-Social Insights For Liberation.
The audio is 74 minutes. See below for timestamps, and click “continue reading” to read the transcript.
0:00 Autumn Brown introduces the event, how she met Ricardo, and the book
7:53 Ricardo introduces the book
10:26 Reading of the chapter “Haiti and the physics of fire”
20:35 Ricardo discusses the elements of the book: personal narrative, history, ecology, and organizing principles
21:20 Autumn asks about when Ricardo first began to notice and teach the connection between Ricardo’s ecology and organizing
22:26 Ricardo responds
25:36 Ricardo talks about the chapter “Organic tensions, birds and windfall”, and polarization in movements
28:44 Autumn speaks to the current moment and asks Ricardo, what is the medicine that you’re offering right now?
29:48 Ricardo responds and talks about what keeps him grounded in times of confusion and danger, and about grief and despair
34:30 Autumn reflects about emotional wounds and healing
35:57 Ricardo talks about restoring power in the face of trauma and emotional injury
37:27 Autumn asks, how is this moment the same and different from other periods of fascistic rise in history?
38:38 Ricardo responds by talking about childraising advice he was given, and about how fascism and authoritarian looks different in different times and places. He talks about differences in how elite factions respond, and about how we can rely on principles like not surrendering public space, using tactics to see us through when we don’t have strategy, and defending those most immediately targeted.
46:53 Autumn reflects about the heat sources of people’s movements
47:40 Ricardo elaborates on how it’s not a time to be purists, and about making alliances from a position of strength
49:19 Autumn asks, what do you think will be possible seven generations from now?
50:15 Ricardo responds and reads a short book excerpt and discusses the emotional and cultural chemistry of change,
55:28 Ricardo talks about regime change in ecosystems using the Everglades as an example
1:00:25 Autumn asks the audience for questions rooted in dilemmas about organizing work
[the questions are audible but are at very low volume in the recording]
1:04:11 Ricardo responds to audience questions by speaking about connecting with the world outside one’s own trauma
1:06:23 Ricardo talks about collectively addressing the feeling of powerlessness and modeling a way of new being
1:09:40 Ricardo concludes by discussing the useful concept of the enemy, that sharp analysis and compassion have to go together, with the Black Panthers’ Rainbow Coalition as an example
1:13:44 End
Transcript
Autumn Brown: I think I’m going to get us going here because it’s already 10 after the hour. I know. It’s wild how time works. And we have quite a lot of juicy things that we’re going to try to talk about tonight. The first juicy thing being Ricardo Levins Morales. [Cheers] My name is Autumn and it is my honor to get to introduce Ricardo Levins Morales to you all. I don’t think I need to introduce Ricardo to you. I think you know why you’re here.
Ricardo Levins Morales: Okay, we’re good then. [Laughter]
AB: But I’m going to do it anyway because it’s part of what I get to do tonight. I also get to interview Ricardo about his book tonight and I get to help kind of moderate a conversation between all of us. And so I’ll share a little bit more later about how that’s going to flow. But first I just want to say, so you all know Ricardo is the community’s uncle, community tío. Ricardo is a long time organizer, an incredible artist, thinker, writer. And I want to say that I knew Ricardo as an artist or knew him through his art many years before I actually met him for the first time. Like I’m sure many of you in this room. He has such a beautiful, incredibly recognizable, very specific style. And so I started picking up on these pieces many years before I actually met Ricardo even years after I moved to Minnesota before I met Ricardo. And then at some point we met, I don’t remember what that context was. Who knows, lost to time. But there was a turning point in our relationship for me. And it was when you and some of the other organizers you were working with through MPD150 invited me to come in and facilitate a visioning session that you all were having. And I don’t remember what year that was. I wonder if anyone in the room who is in a part of that crew remembers. [Crowd answers.] 2018. Who knows? 2018.
RLM: Yeah, it was ’17 or ’18 when we did that particular retreat.
AB: But it could have been 2016, easily. So, yeah. I was going to go with your answer. But he’s the one on stage. So, we were all there. We were all there in the room. But the reason why I experienced it as a turning point in our relationship was because it was the first time I really got to see how you move in community up close. And, wow, we just, we are so in need of the kinds of elders. The kinds of elders, the kind of elder that you are and the kinds that, the particular generation of movement that you came up in and that you provide a through line to into the political moment that we’re in. And I wouldn’t have been able to understand what I was seeing at that time. I don’t think that my, my political analysis has grown quite a bit in the last few years like many of ours has. But I think what I mostly noticed at that point in time was, oh, here is someone who truly is able to show up in a multi-generational movement space with wisdom and not contempt. And all of the younger organizers in the room actually are orienting to you with respect and not coddling. And it was a really interesting dynamic to see to be like, oh, wow, this is truly a mutually respectful, intergenerational organizing relationship that’s been cultivated in this space. And the kinds of conversations that we were able to have that day, I’ve truly not seen in most movement spaces and I’ve been in a lot of movement spaces. And I think from that point on in our relationship, deep end and deep end, mostly through just getting together and having coffee together.
RLM: Coffee!
AB: Lots of coffee has been had. And then I was so honored, Ricardo reached out to me and asked me to be a part of this event. Well, actually months ago, Ricardo asked me to read an advance copy of the book, so I got to blurb it, which was really exciting. And then I’m getting to be in conversation with Ricardo tonight about The Land Knows The Way. And this book probably could not be coming to us at a more important time. So thank you, first of all, for the gift of this work. This book is, it’s for all of us. It’s for organizers. It’s for teachers. It’s for people who want to be organizers, but don’t necessarily know a way into the work right now. It’s for those of us who maybe have been in the work for a long time and feel quite lost and are looking for a different way of orienting to this incredibly turbulent, frightening time that we’re moving through. For some time, Ricardo has been working with this ecological model for healing, ecological model for movement building. And there are a lot of people who talk about the relationship between ecology and organizing. I think the thing that’s different about Ricardo’s work is that it’s very focused on the practical application of those ideas. What does it mean to think about this and then to show up at the next organizing space that you’re in and actually be able to practically apply these values in these concepts? And it’s just an incredible text. It includes stories from literally decades of organizing work as well as just very specific observations of ecosystems and integrates it in such a beautiful, very poetic way. I’m so excited for you all to get to hear parts of this book tonight, which you will get to hear. And I’m excited to be in conversation with you.
RLM: Not to give away too much, but also, there are stories that go back to the late Devonian period 400 million years ago.
AB: Oh. Okay, that’s quite a tease. Okay, so without further ado, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to have a little bit of time where Ricardo is just going to read from the text. And then we’re going to have some time where I’m going to ask Ricardo some questions and he might actually read more of the text in response to some of those questions. And then later, we’re going to have a kind of non-traditional Q&A where we’re going to just harvest a bunch of questions from the room and then talk about them all at the same time as opposed to taking one question at a time. Okay. And then it’ll be over and then you’ll be like, wow, my brain works differently now. And then you’ll go to bed and then you’ll wake up tomorrow morning and you’ll practically apply some of the wisdom that you received here tonight. Sounds sexy and amazing?
[From Audience]: Yeah!
AB: Alright. Are you ready to read to us?
RLM: Sure. First of all, I will say a couple of things. One is that I’ve never written a book before. I’ve never had a book launch event before. I’ve never had a book reading before. So you are witnessing neural connections being made in real time as I learn how to do this. Also, a lot of the sections in this book, it is made up of eight large sections with a lot of smaller collections of stories and narratives making them up. A lot of those are fairly bite-sized, but they’re still a little too long to read the entire section. So I’ve marked off some of the pieces from each that will get the ideas across in what I’m going to read to you, but know that in between there’s more material that feathers out some of these stories in more detail. I was fortunate for the last four or five years of writing this to have become an accountabili-buddy, as my accountabili-buddy, Elle, taught me that word. If anyone knows them, they’re a fantastic playwright.
RLM: What was I just saying?
AB: You are the accountabili-buddy of someone.
RLM: Oh, yes, So Elle is from a different generation and really kept bringing me back to saying, no, you can’t just refer to this event, to this organization, to this thing that happened because people don’t know what you’re talking about, especially people not of that generation. So that really taught me to add more depth, not refer to something that in my growing up was, everybody knew, but in the hot house ecosystem of capitalism, memory fades very quickly and disintegrates very quickly into the soil. So a lot of what I will not necessarily be reading all of the historical details, but there’s a richness in those details that I hope you’ll be able to get sink your teeth into in the book.
AB: And knowing that Ricardo is doing something brand new tonight, let’s all just commit to holding that with a lot of love and care. Can you do that? Just be meaning love at Ricardo?
RLM: Mm-hmm. Ohh! (Crowd laughs)
AB: Good job, everybody. You can feel it already.
RLM: It is the height of summer in 1791. The firestorm of rebellion races across the Haitian countryside, carried on winds of rage. I can never read anything or speak public without crying, so just get used to it. The glow from the flames threatens the sky. Plantation houses, cane fields and coffee groves are reduced to smoldering ash at the hands of the field workers, seamstresses and carriage drivers, whose suffering is the secret sauce of the empire. Haiti. Where black bodies are so cheap in the colonial slave market that it’s considered more cost effective to work humans to death than to make conditions livable. In 1791, the embers ignite. No, let me put that another way. Embers of resistance regularly flare up across the landscape of the enslavement economies, but this is the year they spread.
Fire requires three conditions to take hold. The heat source, fuel and oxygen. Fuel there is plenty of. In the sugar mills, ships and warehouses where the enslaved labor in the tropical heat, under the scornful gaze and biting whip of their self-styled masters. The anger of the oppressed is the dry wood of revolution. The spark can be anything. The sale of a loved one. One whipping too many. A reduction in rations. The rape of a laundry worker. And you might get an explosion.
Then there’s oxygen. Hope is the oxygen of rebellion. Hope makes dreams come to seem possible. Even dreams of freedom. For several years now, rumors have been flying. Uneasy plantation masters notice a a bounce and a gleam in the eyes of many of their workers. Their property. Sailors bring news of unprecedented happenings in France. The storming of the Bastille. The escape and capture of the royal family. The creation of the legislative assembly. The call for liberty, equality, fraternity, electrifies the enslaved to the colonies. If the monarchy can be swept aside under the banner of liberty, can slavery be far behind? The winds of hope blow inland from the waterfront. Hop from port to port. On coastal trading vessels and bounce inland along rutted winding roads in the wagons and merchants. All the latest news is thoroughly digested and debated in the slave quarters, long before it reaches the plantation house.
To keep burning, a fire has to spread. Lightning might strike a patch of grass, setting into blaze. But it will burn itself out if the surrounding foliage is too damp. It must burn long enough and hot enough for nearby the eaves and branches to become dry enough to catch. Oppressors go to great lengths to isolate and contain a flare-up of defiance and put it out before it flares up someplace else. But the uprising in Haiti won’t go out. The initial outbursts in the north have now engulfed the entire colony. It is now a revolution, well-organized, unstoppable.
Finding a place to pick up the story again… I told you I’d be jumping around. In another century, I’m standing a boy of nine years on the cement water tank outside our kitchen door, gazing across the mountains. Away to the north just before the ridges of the Cordillera, give waves to the rounded limestone hillocks we call the Pimplies. I can pick out a white spot of brightness against the darkly forested slopes. The white sunlit cliffs above the coffee town of Lares. Every Puerto Rican knows about Lares. It was there on a September night in 1868 that rebel columns from surrounding communities converged to announce the birth of the Puerto Rican Republic and proclaim the abolition of slavery. So in September 23rd every year, our family would pile into our rusty blue station wagon. Papi behind the wheel would navigate the winding mountain roads to Lares where we’d snake our way on foot through the densely crowded streets.
If we were lucky, we’d find protection from a hot sun in the shade of an overhanging balcony along the edge of the plaza. It was from such a balcony over what is now a nationalist ice-cream parlor that the leaders of the provincial government read their revolutionary program. Patriotic speeches would blare out of a hand-held megaphone from a wooden platform set in front of the church. Puerto Ricans come to this mountain town from all over the island to pay homage to the heroes of a failed revolution and pledge ourselves to complete our task. I don’t want a colony, either Spain or the United States, Betances had, declared warning of the covetous gaze of the power to the north. The master had changed, but the task remained the same. Lares after all, was a Haiti that couldn’t happen.
And I describe a little bit more about the process of organizing that uprising and the alliance building that took place, but I want to bring us to back into a big question that has haunted the Puerto Rican movement.
And Puerto Rico? The failure of the Grito wasn’t just about logistical missteps and betrayals. There was something more. The columns that marched into Lares that evening were not intended to be the fire, only the spark. Success would require an island-wide uprising that did not take place. “¿Qué hacen los puertorriqueños que no se rebelan?” Betances would cry, in frustration. What’s with the Puerto Ricans that they don’t rebel?
Looking across the the folds of the Cordillera, I wonder how it would have been if they succeeded. My heart aching for a dream that might have been, but I don’t have the conceptual grounding to ask why it didn’t. Generations of independentistas have debated this question, Betances’ question. The answer could be hiding in plain view. Scattered along the mountain barrios in coffee towns of the Cordillera Central in the classrooms of local schools and the land deeds of municipal archives, our families with names like Paoli, Masini, Morfi. Or our neighbors across the road, Agostini. Their presence is a product of imperial policies imposed two centuries ago, Spain’s insurance policy against revolution.
So, in Haiti, there was a class of mulatto mixed-race people that had a niche in the economy. They neither had the privilege of the whites nor did they have the, were treated with the brutality of black enslaved people, but they were, they could taste the relative privilege they had enough to want full equality, which they couldn’t get. And sometimes they were allied with the rebels and occasionally, they were unreliable allies, but important ones nonetheless.
So, the colonial authorities in Puerto Rico noted with alarm the steadily darkening skin tones of the island’s pivotal middle classes and fretted about what it might foreshadow. So, in 1815 Spain did what it did best. It issued a decree. What else? Farmable land would be made available at no cost to Europeans of modest means eager to improve their lot and willing to relocate the Puerto Rico. They would have at hand a rural workforce tightly managed under the hated passbook system and would be permitted to engage in slave trading. In this way, they inserted a light-skinned property-owning class that owed its good fortune to the Spanish throne. These new landowners did not see their interests as aligned with the poor and the dark, the laboring classes with their treasonous whisperings about liberty. It was a far-sighted strategy and effective. It was soaking the ground so that any flames that started would not spread, making it wetter by making it whiter. Fire requires all three conditions.
And then I bring us back to me walking around to the other side of the farm, where we can see the Caribbean, see the Mona Channel toward the Dominican Republic. And say, even on a still mountain afternoon with the sound of hummingbirds, whirring among the hibiscus, the invisible smoke plumes of history continue to drift and swirl. Visible from the farm atop the high ridge of Monte de Estado with the waters of the Channel behind, stand the metallic towers of the CIA jamming station. Constructed in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, its purpose is to prevent stray signals from Cuban radio reaching Puerto Rican eras. Another rebellious island had shaken off the chains of its masters, and the sparks from that distant fire carried on the wings of hope must not be allowed to touch another shore.
So, one thing I want to say, another thing that Elle pointed out to me in our process of working together is that this book, a cluster of soil, contains three main ingredients: personal narrative, history and the organizing principles that grow from that, and ecology. And the combination of those varies from piece to piece so this one is one with a lot of history, others have other elements that they emphasize. But in the end, my hope is to awaken an appetite and a hunger for the nutrients that history and ecology have to offer.
AB: Thank you. An even though this particular selection you read was history rich, I mean I didn’t lose the, what fire needs. Heat source, fuel, oxygen. Right there. There’s so many places that I’m going to try to get us to go tonite. We’ll see what happens. But the 1st question that I wanted to ask you, because ecology does form the foundation of this work, I wanted you to give us a little bit of the history and sight of you. When did you begin to notice the connection between ecology and organizing, and what made you really stake your teaching to that awareness?
RLM: Well, I mean, I think one of the things, you know, I certainly grew up in an ecosystem, not a media system. Right, you know, there were no screens in my life, or blinky lights or beeps. But, and I had parents who were fascinated with nature, because of my father, in fact, would become an ecologist. Having worked out ideas about sustainability while hoeing potatoes on the farm, since we started out because of the repression in Puerto Rico, the black list in the U.S., the repression after the Nationalist Rebellion in 1950, farming to survive, since other job options weren’t available. But, I think, I don’t know, I don’t really know the answer to that. I know that I started out just seeing, noticing patterns. So, getting these sense that movements came in tides. Sometimes in sometimes out, that certainly synchronized with the cycles of rainy season and dry season and drought and, you know, overabundance of water and replenishment and depletion that I could see around my in my playground, right. And, I think the greatest gift my parents provided was the gift of curiosity. So that I would, you know, I just was interested in skill and in so many things. So that I read a book once by a topological physicist. What the heck is that? [Crowd laughs] Right, but it’s very accessible, well written, you know, story, very down to earth woman, and she talked about how, you know, a topological physicist, by the way, that’s people who are obsessed with the shape and size of the universe. Is it bumpy? Is it flat? Is it, you know, finite, infinite, all those kinds of things? The things that I know keep you up awake at night.
But she talks about how when you are in freefall, like if you jump out of an airplane and you haven’t opened up your parachute yet, you are falling basically at the speed of gravity. And you don’t feel the forces of gravity pressing against. Right now you can feel gravity pressing up against, you know, against your butt sides and your feet, right? If that floor disappeared, you would start falling at the speed of gravity no longer feel that pressing against you. I think, oh, if you’re moving at the speed of that force, you don’t feel it. Okay, so if you are floating down the river of whiteness at the speed of racism, meaning that you’re a white person, you don’t feel the force of that current. If you are black or brown, indigenous, you know, standing in that river, you are feeling it and you’ve developed muscles to deal with that, right? So there’s just ways in which naturally these different patterns started: Oh, okay, I know what that is because of this. And just one example, there’s a section I’m not going to read from it, but I’ll just mention there’s a section I write about organic tensions. Starting with a windfall in the forest of seeds and birds, a cluster of birds, right? And sometimes they’ll just scatter because too many birds in one place could attract predators. But they scatter because the more sensitive and jumpy birds, either because they’re on the outside edge and they’re more vulnerable, feel more vulnerable, or because of their own particular species or their own history of near escapes. There are some that are more jittery than others, right? A jittery bird won’t get eaten necessarily, but they’re using up a lot of energy when they could have been feeding. A complacent bird is managing their energy metabolism better, but they could fall victim to a hawk or a snake or something like that, right?
So I carry that over in the piece to talk about the Occupy movement here, and the tension between urgency and patience that caused the division in the movement. A similar division that happened in 1961 in SNCC, in the Civil Rights Movement, the student wing between the community organizing and the public defiance branches of that movement that almost caused a split in the organization, although Ella Baker, who’s seen back here [gestures at tapestry of Ella Baker portrait behind him], put her foot down and prevented it. It’s also occurred in 1885 when the Métis Rebellion in Canada was in full swing and their leadership sent out a call to their indigenous allies to come to their aid. And the Plains Cree, you know, a band of Plains Cree moving toward where this battle was taking place, debating every night, with the faction that felt that we need to go to their help, their aid as a matter of honor, and another faction saying no, we need to be able to protect ourselves because the Métis don’t have enough ammunition to really stand up against the Canadian government, and we’ll just go down with them. So we see these organic tensions emerging again and again, and when I call it an organic tension, what I mean is that it’s never resolved. It’s only managed, because no matter what, if you have an organization where two people, this often happens, represent the two poles of that tension – yeah, it happened here in Black Lives Matter too, between process and action, right, in urgency and patience. That if the people who are leading those two factions leave, somebody else will emerge to represent those poles. It doesn’t have to be the kind of polarization that causes division. It can be well managed, but again, it’s one of those things that if we understand that that’s how it works, it gives us tools to be able to say, okay, you know, we need both wings to fly, because both of those, you know, hyper-vigilance and sort of calm patience are necessary elements in effective organizing.
AB: Wow. Well, there’s so many tools in this book. There’s so many places that we could go to highlight, and I think I want to take us right to the heart of what’s, you know, alive in the bodies of everyone in this room, which is the, this profound moment of devastation and overwhelm and fear that we are living in right now and the level of powerlessness that many people feel, particularly on the left. I’m wondering if you could, from your vantage point about this work, what is the medicine that you’re offering right now?
RLM: Okay, I’m glad we set aside three days for this conversation.
[Crowd laughs]
AB: We’re bending time. Are we in three days now?
RLM: So, there are so many ways I could begin to answer that. I think I’ll start with saying what keeps me grounded in times of confusion, transition and danger. And for me, it really comes back to grounding in cycles, so, when Donald Trump came crashing onto the political stage, I never could have predicted it. I mean, who knew that history would be taken over by a cartoon character? But the idea that in the fading period, the extended fading period of an empire, that the ruling elite will start being attracted to authoritarian rule in order to restore profitability and roll back, you know, people’s gains, that was not a surprise to me. So then my automatic response, it’s like in the rainy season, there are certain tasks and the dry season, there are certain tasks. We’re here in Minnesota, in winter and summer and spring, and so, for me, it’s simply an automatic reshifting and say, okay, this is the moment we are at in these cycles. What are the tasks? Now, I know that that is particularly difficult. See, I have the advantage that I didn’t grow up with certain illusions that are common in the culture, that we are on a trajectory toward, a linear trajectory of things getting better, better and better. So I don’t have to deal with that sort of existential, “oh my God, this is not the world I thought I was going to be in”, which is certainly traumatic. But if we look at the world that isn’t paralyzed by the feeling that this is not how it’s supposed to be, that means that we’re looking at a world that exists and our emotional grounding is in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. And we have not reconciled ourselves to the fact that this has changed, and that wasn’t the case. And unless I can do, you know, and the Buddhist concept of acceptance doesn’t mean you’re okay, you’re cool with how things are, it just means that you recognize that it is how things are. Therefore, you have the clarity to be able to act.
And the transition from denial to acceptance is called grieving, right? We have to be able to let go, and it’s heartbreaking what we have to let go of. We have to let go of the idea that the polar bears would always have a secure habitat, that the Amazon would be a secure place for the people who’s home that is, that all of these specific things that are broken, not necessarily completely, but broken enough that whatever comes out of it, whatever really happens, it’ll never be what it was. That’s grieving. However, grieving for the end of the world, the end of hope, that’s not strategic. That’s not strategic grieving. We need to be able to grieve what’s grievable.
AB: Ooooh, slow that down.
RLM: That is an emotion. Our emotions give us information about the world, and we process that to gain understandings of how we feel about that, what are we going to do, right? Our senses give us information, our emotions process, and then we act on that. And we have so many emotions that we feel in response to things that are happening. Despair is not an emotion. It’s a malfunction of the emotional immune system, because instead of bringing you actionable information, it signals your body that there’s no point in getting the information you need to choose a course of action because everything is hopeless. So that is something that immediately needs to be paid attention to. You need sort of EMT care for that. You have to be able to deal with that despair because despair, depression, hopelessness–they’re not what happens when there’s no possibility. They’re what prevents you from seeing possibilities. So it’s like heal or heal thyself, right? If we’re going to be who we need to be in this moment, then we have to do our homework. We have to let go of what has to be let go of. So that, you know, unprocessed grief is a burden that weighs us down and keeps us, hurts us in so many ways. Processing is the way we free ourselves of that. And to be honest, I’m speaking as a person who has run away from grieving with everything I got my entire life, right? You know, I know this is not an easy thing, but it’s um, one of the three days worth of answers to your question.
AB: Now I’m going to step off the map a little bit because just this… Oh! You have to grieve what is grievable. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this, that we cannot unmake the wound that was made. Which means that we have to have completely, we have to figure out how to have a completely different orientation to the wound that we carry. And even the idea that we have to close it is not necessarily the most useful way of thinking about it. You know, I think a lot now about, well, what’s, what speaks through the wound? If I’m trying to close it, then I’m not going to be able to hear what speaks through it necessarily. Or if, or what if the wound is actually like a, you know, an opening or a portal, or, you know, it’s going to take me somewhere, you know. And I’ve been, yeah, so it’s just you’re speaking to me in a place that I feel very challenged by this, that, you know, and some of it has to do with the, you know, popular psychology or sort of therapy speak that kind of floods the world. That ways that we tend to think about healing that are not actually related to what we actually need in order to heal. Or that healing is not necessarily the goal.
RLM: Right, well, yeah, and there’s a lot of ways that that can be framed. But it’s interesting that within the world of therapy, you know, trauma study and all that, a lot of the wisdom that cultures have always held in dealing with emotional injury are starting to infiltrate, right? And some of the, I mean, in trauma, the story we had in the world, like we were talking about, gets shattered, right? And we can’t put the pieces together. There are therapists who in recent years have started, you know, have abandoned the way they previously thought about healing as being restoring what happened, how a person was before they were injured and have changed that language to Re-Storying. Right, because if the story that I had when I was younger was that the world is a safe place and some bad shit happened, I know damn well, that I don’t want to go back to that belief because that is not a safe belief. So re-storying means you incorporate the knowledge of our histories, whether they’re personal or collective, into a new narrative that we can use to move forward. And a narrative also that highlights the resilience and, you know, the fact that we’re here is always proof of resilience and survivability. And that is what we need to ferret out into our stories so that we have a way to apply it.
AB: Mm hmm. Well, so thinking about re-storying and thinking about cycles, bigger, much bigger cycles, and not wanting to collapse in the face of danger, let’s talk about fascism. Okay, so we’re in a moment of global fascistic rise. We are currently living in the midst of a coup in our own country, a fascist coup. And as they say in Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before. So how is this moment the same and different from other periods of fascistic rise in history? And yeah, I would love for you to kind of take us there. Like what can we draw from the fact that this cycle repeats itself? What are some of the, maybe what is some of the muscle that’s available to us now because of the fact that the cycle is repeating that wouldn’t have been available in a previous cycle?
RLM: Okay, so for some reason what pops into my head is the well-intentioned advice that Paula and I were given when we were preparing to have our first child. And that’s they said that you can never really be ready. You can never prepare because this is unimaginable. You don’t have any idea what this is going to be like. Oh my God, you’ve never, you know, you don’t have any of what’s needed. And it was like, a little bad advice, right? Because everything that it takes to raise a child are elements of other things that you’ve figured out in life, but just in different combinations. And this is true as well of what we’re facing now and what we face in a coup. And authoritarianism has various flavors. There’s authoritarian democracies. There’s dictatorships. There’s martial law. There’s fascism that all have sort of different power structures. I don’t want to get into the nit-picky of that. But a lot of what we call fascism looks different in different places. And there’s some things that they all have in common. The centralization of power, the stamping out of dissent, the closing of the public space. You know, public space for speaking, for organizing, for dissenting, trying to disable the different ways in which we have to resist. Right? How that plays out looks so different in different places depending on the balance of forces.
One of the things that we don’t have any, very much, control over is how the different factions of the elite are going to respond. Right? In Cuba, in the movement against the dictatorship there, in the 1950s, the elite parties, when there was a coup, Batista’s coup, the elite parties, none of them stood up. So you had a grassroots movement that was far more radical because their coalition didn’t include industrialists and generals. In the movement against the Marcos dictatorship, in the Philippines, elements of the elite who felt shut out of the wealth stepped up to put themselves in front of a people’s movement that had already existed. So that when Marcos fled, the elite were able to maintain their control. All of these different things, right?
I have a section in there about the art of polarization, about chipping flint. You want to break the stone in a certain way so that a certain amount of the mass remains so you have your tool and the rest gets chipped off and becomes isolated. So there’s a lot of that that is really unclear right now. And in fact, the factions of the elite haven’t decided yet. How reckless are Trump and Musk, is their destructiveness more important than the goodies that they’re giving, the irresistible goodies of rolling back things? I mean, just a few things – so I think the important thing when we don’t know what to do and we don’t know, it’s not very clear, everything that’s going on, is to rely on those muscles, on certain instincts. One is don’t ever surrender the public space willingly or voluntarily because it’s very hard to win back. So whatever it takes. Another is that when we don’t have strategy, tactics can see us through. Tactics are how you keep people engaged. It doesn’t matter if it’s brilliant or not, just do it, right? Get people and keep the ferment going, keep the other side from stabilizing, put them on the defensive wherever possible, punish those who have capitulated. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Target. Right? So that, over time it will become clear as we move forward. I mean, obviously we defend the people most immediately targeted in whatever ways we can. With whoever is willing to do it. It’s not a time to be purists. It doesn’t have to be pure. People don’t have to have necessarily a clear analysis of the way in which control of borders fits into the operation of you know, colonialism and imperialism. They just have to think this is a pretty shitty thing to do to people. Right? And then, of course, in the process, we want to move things toward a better future than a default back to, you know, the neoliberal version of the empire.
I mean, there’s a lot to talk about. There’s actually a lot being put out that’s quite good for people saying you know, with suggestions of what to do. Some of it is quite clueless, but it’s still really cool that people have the instinct to resist. [Crowd laughs] I mean, the people saying “leaving Meta and going to Bluesky, you know, and Mastodon, IS the revolution.” Or “so and so just destroyed Trump!”, with a snarky comment on Twitter. No, they’re not destroying anyone actually. It doesn’t have a difference. You know, people’s organizing is what has an impact not memes. [Laughter]
AB: Memes are funny though. Great for fun.
RLM: Yeah, I saw a good one the other day. [Laughter] But, I also want to point out the context, too, is that over the last 20 years, we’ve seen a steady rise in mass movements on both the left and the right. We’re not simply in a moment where, oh, the right wing has surged and they’ve taken over everything they have, but, the left wing has been surging too. And we’ve had an entire continuing rhythm of movements, you know, from the Wisconsin labor rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the Dreamers, Standing Rock, Palestine Solidarity, etc. None of which came out of the nonprofit world, the established unions, you know, the tribal governments. They all came out from unorganized spaces. And some of them have incorporated larger waves of protest than have ever been seen in this country. I mean, you have all-white towns in Utah marching for Black Lives. By definition, these are huge numbers of people who have never been involved in it before. Don’t have organizations. Don’t have a clear orientation. Don’t know what to do next. We’ve seen a lot of waves of movement without a structural foundation, but those seeds are there. And the shock of that has actually shifted a lot of consciousness. It just needs to have a container and it needs to have a drumbeat, right, you know, provided to them.
So I just want to point that out. That it’s not just the people in this room against a universe of MAGA fascists because even the people supporting Trump, MAGA fascists are a faction of that, an important part of it. But there are so many people whose alienation is so profound, they’ll reach for anything on the menu that seems to respect them or to provide some kind of answer that they’re not getting from anywhere else. Right? And so you see the same people, you know, just sort of oscillating back and forth and voting for Bernie Sanders and voting for Trump and voting for Obama and voting for, you know, it’s like, it’s not because they have a deep profound political analysis that keeps shifting, but they certainly, there isn’t a narrative on the table that really meets their needs. Truth-telling has not been a big priority for what passes for the left ever since it was taken over by the nonprofits. You can’t tell a big story if you’re a nonprofit. You’re about a narrow mission, you know, gate-kept by the lawyers on your board and the funders and all the rest, right? Yeah, don’t get me started. [Laughter]
AB: Let’s not get him started.
RLM: It’s too late.
AB: Well, I also want to just recall, again, what fire needs. Because you’re describing, I think, heat source. You know, in terms of all the, both the surges that are happening in unstructured ways and also these groups that are oscillating between different political positions. I mean, this is all heat source. So that’s just an interesting thing, I think, for us to take note of. I also really appreciate what you just said, but it’s not a time to be purist. I think we maybe cannot hear that enough.
RLM: And if I could just elaborate on that.
AB: Please do.
RLM: This is a fear it seems that a lot of activists in our movements have that if I make tactical alliances with people who are not really profoundly on our side in a lot of ways, that my integrity, my clarity is all going to get lost and they’re going to absorb me. It’s possible to enter those alliances from a position of strength and from an assumption of strength. You don’t just don’t give up your narrative. Entering into alliances doesn’t mean you water down what you believe so that you can work with people. It means you go into that alliance and say, this is what I’m bringing to the table. We can work together and I will use this to push forward my vision. You’re going to use it to push forward to yours. But we both agree that people in our community should be deported. And sometimes they’re tactical alliances. Sometimes you don’t even want to call them alliances. But in a way they’re coalitions of opportunity. There are moments where a sheriff’s department, a reactionary sheriff’s department who wants to be able to have the community give them, you know, intelligence about what’s going on, also for reasons of their own, don’t want people deported and don’t want police to have to cooperate with ICE. So we’ve got to take advantage of all of these things. Don’t be scared of that, but also don’t assume that we’re the weak partner going in.
AB: And, slash, don’t be the weak partner, right? But in order to not be the weak partner we have to train ourselves. I think, yes?. So I’m going to bring us to the last question that I had prepared and then we’ll make room for some – Do we have, is it okay if we go over a little bit? Yeah.
RLM: Like what, two days?
AB: Because we’re only like a day in, right now, I know. I heard you say that this book to you is about training the intuition. And when I heard you say that it made me think of what another teacher that I really love, Norma Wong, talks about as the Far Horizon. And the place that is, you know, seven generations in the future which puts it beyond what’s easy for us to imagine. And I was wondering if you would answer this fun question. What do you think will be possible 140 years from now, if a critical mass of people in this generation trained their intuition?
RLM: Okay, well I’m going to start by answering a question that you didn’t ask.
AB: We have one and a more half days.
RLM: I know how it’s done. [Laughter]
RLM: Because this is about how we deal with the moment, right? So it’s a segue in a way. [Reading] The mirrors that we hold up for each other help us to remember or discover who we are. That implies knowing where we are in time, place in the web of life. Or with Grace Lee Boggs, we’d say, where are we on the clock of the world? That implies knowing, okay, and in history. The answers we seek for how to navigate in uncertain worlds are not found in the past, but their roots are. Roots are what support new growth and the future is always a synthesis of ancient roots and new growth. We actually should not expect to find answers only choices. There are no instructions carved into stone buried in a field somewhere waiting to be uncovered. There’s no map with our route marked out for us. Maps are useful instruments. They’re like a snapshot of the lay of the land at moments in time, but in a landscape constantly shifting they are not enough. Effective strategies do not emerge from certainties, but from attentiveness. We need to be able to read the land in its natural, social, and historical dimensions, sense changes in wind direction, identify opportunities and spot dangers. My father calls it training the intuition. It comes with practice. [Stops reading]
When we look forward, the future that we will encounter in 140 years, that somebody will encounter in 140 years, will depend on the process that gets us there. I want to pause because that feels to me like a really crucial point. The process of getting to the future defines the future. Samora Machel, who was the leader of the Mozambique anti-colonial movement against the Portuguese in the 60s and 70s, as they approached the victory and the dictatorship in Portugal was crumbling, and independence was around the corner, he worried that they had won too soon. That there were important sectors of the Mozambique and people who had not yet been absorbed into the process of change and consciousness and the experience of solidarity, which would make the process going forward from that more difficult. So that process, the process of culture change, the process of shifting, aligning people’s beliefs, right?. I can’t create the future I want just by imagining it. If everybody in this room is aligned with what we see that future could be, then we have a collective project. If a million people or 10 million people are aligned with that vision, we have a movement, but there are so many other culture currents. I have to say that if I envision what I think reality offers us, the collapse of empires, however that happens, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen in better ways or worser ways, but this current era is obviously going to come to an end. Whatever comes next will be an extended period of change and transition. Social transitions are always extended with bold experiments and setbacks, with disappointment, and hopefully building in a rhythm towards something better, but when you have had great change, when you have suffered under oppressive systems, if you go into the next period and it’s not handled with grace, and we haven’t been able to figure out how to face the potential of scarcity or work out ways to doing things, people will emerge more nostalgic for the good old days. Even if they weren’t good, “ahh the good old days under Pinochet” or whatever. There’s a lot of inoculation that has to go into the way we build movements and really work on the chemistry, the emotional and cultural chemistry of change, because it’s not simply a question of overthrowing a system, and then our hearts are all open to each other. It takes struggle and it takes a lot of healing from the internalization of oppression. There’s a saying, a term in ecology, I have a chapter on this, believe it or not, an ecological term is “regime change,” which involves the transformation of one ecosystem to another by a change in the dominant species. And that, like in a pine forest, is dominated by pine trees, who leave pine needles, or their bark, all of the things make the soil acidic. That determines what undergrowth can grow there. That determines what insects are attracted, what birds come to eat them. Those are the changes. Can I tell the story about the Everglades?
AB: Yes.
RLM: So regime change came to the Everglades in the 1970s. It also requires three factors, kind of like fire. So the Everglades is a wetland dominated for 5,000 years by a plant called, um…
Audience member: Sawgrass.
RLM: Sawgrass, thank you!
AB: Science in the room!
RLM: So sawgrass is accustomed to a low-phosphorus environment, which the Everglades was. Most environments have a lot of phosphorous, which plants use, this one didn’t. So everything there is adapted to low phosphorous. Phosphorous started getting introduced to the Everglades by sugar plantations in the 1970s, and it was run off from fertilizer. Prior to that, if you had a storm or a fire or a deep freeze or a flood that killed off some of the foliage, the soil grass would recolonize. That’s what was there. And if spores from cattails on the outside of the Everglades blew in and landed, there was not enough phosphorous for them to grow. But the fertilizer started affecting that. Eventually you had more phosphorous in the water. When you had a big disturbance, the cattails could take root and start spreading, both through rhizomes and through spores, or through airborne seeds anyway. And more and more areas started being colonized by cattails until you started having these shifts, where a sawgrass ecosystem got flipped into being a cattail ecosystem. So there were three elements, the condition of the soil, in this case including the water, disturbance and available alternatives. That’s what we’re talking about.
AB: Say it again, please. [Laughter] Condition of the soil –
RLM: Condition of the soil, disturbance and alternatives. So the condition of the soil, that’s the cultural beliefs, the assumptions, you know, many of you are familiar with that metaphor by now, right? What is the emotional and cultural profile of the soil that can support certain things? And you need to have, you know, alternatives. You need to have your collective farms and your hydro ecology and your people’s schools and your ways of nurturing a new vision. And enough that people gain experience and believe that these things can be viable, at least enough people. But those can’t take root under the towering trees of hedge funds and banks and fossil fuel companies. So you need disturbance, you need to block those pipelines, you need to interrupt the war machines, you need to refuse to ship weapons to Israel, you need to do all of the movement of disturbance. So all of these things need to be in a rhythm together in order to create regime change. And there’s one difference between us – there might be more than one difference between us and a wetland. [Laughter] But the one that I’m thinking of is that unlike sawgrass and cattails, we are creatures not just of evolution but also of history and of narrative. Which means that for us to take the three elements we have to add a fourth, and that is the healing, if you’ll accept the term, the coming to, doing the cleansing of the internalized behavioral patterns and default modes of behavior that default systems back into oppression when they’ve thrown off oppression. As we have seen with the first draft efforts at socialism, which came out pretty “okay,” some of them were pretty horrific, are not good advertisements for change or others. Or the anti-colonial movements, right? Many things are replicated because there was not enough of a depth of understanding of those changes, right? Graça Machel, who was also a leader of the Mozambican movement, talks about how we had no idea that the way that the struggle unfolded would leave us in the aftermath with mass outbreaks of PTSD, domestic violence, all of these things from the trauma that – which is not to say that a clear alternative path was available, but to know what the complexities are so that you can start developing antidotes to the inevitable harms that we create just in the course of living, let alone struggling.
AB: Wow. Nicely done. Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. Can we go over like 10 more minutes? Yeah, awesome. Okay, thank you. One of the things that Ricardo and I wanted to do tonight was to be able to root the next part of the conversation and the actual dilemmas that you all are facing your in your organizing work, in your community work. And maybe not everyone in this room identifies as an organizer, but you’re about to become one. But however it is that you are in community. And so we wanted to just take a little round up of – [Looks at someone] are you doing aikido moves so far with your hands? Hi, fellow aikidoist. So, some dilemmas that you are facing, some questions that you have for Ricardo that are rooted in the dilemmas that you’re facing in your organizing work. We’ll take like three at one time. And then we’ll just see where we go in the conversation.
Audience member #1: What guidance or offering would you give to someone who is struggling to recognize that there is a world outside of their own trauma?
AB: Great question.
Audience member #2: I keep noticing and experiencing how we bring together people who are struggling with oppression, how we embody trauma, and how when we come together to address where we want to go and need to go, we end up triggering one another, because we haven’t experienced healing. So there’s a role that healing plays in revolution or deep social change. And I don’t think we’ve got a guidebook for that right now.
AB: Thank you.
Audience member #3: We’ve seen historically how the rise in eugenics and the rise of fascism and go hand in hand. And I’m wondering if you have any ideas or like, paths forward when so many organizing spaces refused covid mitigations, or like, refuse to acknowledge that the ongoing pandemic is still ongoing. Or any ways to like bridge that gap because it just feels like there’s such a disconnect there.
AB: Thank you. You feel like that’s good?
RLM: Oh, you said three. But yeah, I want to hear some more understanding that I won’t have time to talk forever.
AB: We can take one more.
Audience member #4: Could you talk about the concept of an enemy?
RLM: What’s that?
Audience member #4: Could you talk about the concept of an enemy – and how that fits into [inaudible].
AB: All right. That’s probably enough.
RLM: Yeah. [Pauses] I think the first three questions anyway all have a similar – a similar response. And again, these are things that I struggle with too. I don’t want to sort of – it’s about finding our way together. So this is a conversation, not a prescription. But to be aware, connect with the world outside one’s own trauma, you have to be able to expose yourself to it and experience it, and if pushing through that veil of, sort of, trauma doesn’t allow you, if you don’t have the ability, don’t experience the ability to push that enough to seize the sunshine and hear the birds and hear the water trickling, then it absolutely has to be made into a collective effort. I think that another aspect of that is to not–one of the things about trauma is that we’re always afraid that it’s permanent, that we’ll never get past it, etcetera. So one, another strategy is the Aikido strategy of trying to relax and just listen to it. Instead of pushing against it, because sometimes it gets stronger when we push against it and we panic and I think I’ll never get to the surface, I’ll never breathe water. It becomes self-fulfilling. And so this is a generally phrased question of course, so it has to be a generally phrased answer. But it’s again partly flipping the script. You know, our traumas are our survival mechanism in a way for shit that happened to us. It’s not coherent, it’s not healthy necessarily. But sometimes what I have done is to thank whatever behavioral pattern or trauma or limitation it is for having gotten to me where I am and done its best to keep me safe and say, “I’m sorry, but I have to say goodbye. Thank you. Now, go.”
With how, with your question, let’s see. One of the things that I’ve learned in the course of the struggle is to look for bigger, always ask a bigger question than one I think I’m asking. So that, one of the things that I’ve learned through some of the community trauma work is, and my own learning, is that when we feel powerless, we turn on each other. I’ve had the experience, and some of you are familiar with the group MPD150 that dealt with police stuff, that there was a hopeful framing of that outside of the cycle of useless reform demands and re-traumatizing that was happening in the movement that was happening in the movement at that time for some reasons, that I’m still fascinated with. My perception was that people came into that space – people, organizers, many of whom had never even met each other and they left their egos at home, didn’t fight over an idea just because it’s “my idea”. Different people stepped forward to take leadership and the space was made for them to do that when the task at hand was appropriate to their skills, right?. So I think of that as hope-based leadership, and it doesn’t feel to me like an individual problem. It feels like, well, okay, what is it that’s happening? Not why these people being assholes, but what is it that’s happening in this moment, this organization, or this movement that is leaving people feeling disappointed or powerless? And what do we need to do to address that? And for some people who are just worn down by the struggle, it can partly be experiencing sunlight and just stepping back and breathing, but also it can mean kind of re-figuring how we’re conceptualizing the struggle so that it becomes a regenerative one, and not a depleting one. I mean, that’s my life’s work, basically, is trying to do that.
The same with denial, is that I think – I went to a seminar by two clinical social workers who were trauma therapists, and one of them said that when you’re dealing with a client – and this was for a room full of therapists, who she was talking to – but when you, the therapist, are dealing with a client who’s deeply traumatized and is reaching toward you for what you have to offer, they’re not reaching for your tools, they’re reaching to become more like you. Which kind of blew my mind, and it also applies to leadership, but I think that continually telling, keeping up a drumbeat and modeling, saying, okay, we will continue to model this way of being, which will immediately resonate with the people who see its importance. And, over time, that’s not separate from struggling with people around it, but there’s a lot in movement struggle that’s about patience, not complacency, but long term commitment and just not backing down, and drawing whatever lines we need to draw for our own safety or out of our sense of solidarity with others.
And I’ll end with the enemy. [Laughter] So, one of the things that is a fear that people hold is that if I come at the struggle with a sharp analysis of colonialism, racism, misogyny and those kinds of things, I’ll be dehumanizing the people on the other side and becoming just like them because I’m drawing these sharp lines of polarization. Or, the other side of that fear is that if I recognize everybody’s humanity and the way people are injured into becoming oppressors and all of that, then I’ll lose my analysis and come to believe that all we have to do is sit down and have a nice conversation and everything’s going to be okay, and we’ll love one another. So, I believe that sharp analysis and compassion actually have to go together. I think that “enemy” is a useful concept. It is a position. It is a role. It is people fitting into a role in machinery that are trying to kill us, that are trying to prevent our dreams from coming true. That is positional. It doesn’t mean that the people in that role are evil. It doesn’t mean that they’re unredeemable. I have had the experience of being in movements where people who were in the driver’s seat or at least in the machinery of the enemy machine have come over to our side. But I think the concept of “enemy” does create a line of demarcation that says that there are certain things we do not cross. There are certain positions that are meant to harm us and we’re not going to meet them halfway. It’s really a question that this vision needs to replace that vision in order for us to move forward.
That’s one of the things that really stuck with me when I arrived in Chicago from Puerto Rico, the Black Panthers were organizing with the Young Lords and others in the, by now think pretty well known, Rainbow Coalition of the Panthers plus some former street gangs. What I took away from that is that in the face of polarization you don’t build bridges. You find the geological layer below the castle, that we all stand, on which are usually just about human needs. Human needs and human emotions, on top of which toxic narratives have been created. And you sure as hell don’t meet halfway. “Okay, let’s come up with a vision that’s half racist and half anti-racist.” [Laughter] And of course that’s the liberal strategy and then we’ll all be happy. So anyway, that’s the way I come to terms with that. Yes, we need to be clear about people positioned into a certain role that we have to sometimes just confront while holding in our hearts that by all rights most of these people should be on our side. My father used to say that the people who think that they’re our enemy and are fighting us mostly have been fooled, frightened or bribed into doing that. And there’s only a fairly small cluster who really are structurally our enemy. And that’s going back to fascism–that is why fascism depends so much on misdirecting people’s anger and frustration and alienation. So that we don’t build that commonality.
AB: Wow, three days. [Audience applause] Thank you, Ricardo for this book.
