Roses are comrades too

some thoughts on the revolutionary history of human/nonhuman solidarity

The police release us in the early hours, blinking into a wasteland. Behind the metal fence, a four-lane a-road. Behind that, a McDonalds and a colossal Asda. We find ourselves in a small gap between the glassy monolith of the state and the noisy, noxious world of late capitalism. And we’re fine. Beaming in fact. Friends have greeted us with blankets, snacks and beer. We huddle, share stories of arrest, marvel at the coverage of the morning’s action, and wait for the rest of us to be released. 

Then something weird: a few meters from our outpost a fox, standing in the gap, taking us in. Inquisitive, triangulated face, burnt yellow eyes. My friend approaches, kneels down to greet them, and says, finishing a private conversation in utter seriousness, “yes, yes, we know, we’re working on it”. And the fox seemingly satisfied, or perhaps not, turns to show us its sacrificial tail, and leaves.

Then, fast, everything expands. The whole world that McDonalds and the police state have colonised appears like a sudden flash. The plains, lakes, mammoth trees. The intimacy. The great night sky. Oh god, our enclave is not an enclave at all, it’s a crack. I could have wept. Should have maybe.

We know our real power in the fight for a liveable life is solidarity. So what happens when we let this power extend from humans to everyone else? Well, it always has. The history of resistance is brimming with stories of humans and the rest of the living world clubbing together to survive. They just need a bit of noticing. 

I was thinking recently about this speech, for instance, from the union and suffragette organiser Helen Todd in 1912: 

“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” 

This legendary mingling of bread with roses has echoed across the century. There are films named in honour of it, pubs, theatres, albums, poems, journals, organisations and an excellent coop cafe in Bradford. It resonates because Todd is insisting on a deep transformation of the world. She is speaking to the universal need for meaning, beauty and joy. And to do this she is aided by the rose. It becomes a symbol of abundance; it holds open a space that Capital and Empire have been trying to close; it is the space of beauty outside of commodification, beauty for the sake of it.

We can only guess at her connection to the plant. Perhaps it was normie: the rose as an exciting gift from a new love. Perhaps her mother grew them in her childhood garden. Or perhaps one empty Chicago morning on her way to work, run-down, near crushed by union-busters, scabs and the smears of the right-wing press, immiserated by the overbearing bank buildings, she is flagged down by a wave of bright light pinkish dissent reaching out to her over a garden fence. Perhaps in this moment the roses lift her spirit just above the waterline, perhaps they communicate a fierce, playful message: “keep going, it’s worth it, look”.

Half a century later another non-human body comes to support some long dehumanised human bodies: the black panther. “We chose for the emblem a black panther”, said Stokely Carmichael in 1966, “a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.” How much did this powerful feline figure bolster the black panthers’ sense of fierce, sleek defiance? How did indigenous mythologies of the amazonian big cat become translated into a symbol of militant black radicalism? I don’t know, but it’s a powerful alliance that broadcasted a message of salvaged dignity and strength across the world.

I get that this might all feel a bit silly. Such has been the trivilisation of any connection with Land and Life that goes beyond just a superficial aesthetic appreciation. And surely there are more urgent questions facing us. Why on earth would we focus on getting along with plants and animals when we can barely get along with each other?  

Here, Timothy Morton, ecological solidarity theorist par excellence, helps reframe the question when he asks, “how can humans achieve solidarity even among themselves if massive parts of their social, psychic and philosophical space have been cordoned off?”

This cordoning off refers to the collective trauma that most humans living in capitalist modernity, dislocated from the living world around us, have left unresolved. Morton calls this trauma -with serious, playful pomp- ‘The Severing’. And,

“like a gigantic, very heavy object such as a black hole, the Severing distorts all the decisions and affinities that humans make. Difficulties of solidarity between humans are therefore also artifacts of repressing and suppressing possibilities of solidarity with nonhumans.” (italics mine)

In other words, human disconnection from one another exacerbates human disconnection from the world and vice versa.

Another story in the history of revolutionary human/life alliances brings this idea to life. In the same era of the Black Panthers, a group of disenchanted communists, reeling from the death of one of their ideological leaders in New York, were searching desperately for new ideas. It was the dog days of the American Communist movement. Stalin’s atrocities were coming to light, and all certainty and conviction was draining out of the movement for a better world. One of these communists, Murray Bookchin, stumbled upon a theory that would come to change the world, and inspire movements for decades to come.

And here’s the forgotten bit, he came up with these ideas in league with soil. 

Industrial agriculture was starting to flood the land with toxins and fertilisers, destroying landscapes across the US. The ecology that had provided human food for thousands of years - the life of the soil -  was being torn apart. What Bookchin observed (along with others like Rachel Carson) was that addicted, fragile and deadly monocultures were no replacement for the diversity, complexity, and mutual aid of living systems like soil.

Bookchin came to see how the imposition of monocultures on these ecosystems was part of the same strategy of US imperialist imposition of its monoculture on the world. In this way, and in many others, the domination of nature was intrinsically connected to domination between humans. What has made Bookchin such an inspiration to radical movements ever since, is that he didn’t stop there. He began to formulate a thrilling new vision for another possible world. To rebuild our societies we need an ethics inspired by the characteristics we find in flourishing ecosystems. That is, we need deep connections of reciprocal support, a vast diversity of beings and the maximisation of collective freedom.

Today these ideas have become Social Ecology (To learn more about Social Ecology, this podcast is a great intro). They animate the work of the radical democratic experiments all over the world. Including the revolutionaries in Northern Syria who have been sustaining the feminist, ecological and democratic Rojava revolution for over a decade - a fierce flickering of hope in the midst of an unimaginably violent conflict.

Funny that there, in figuring out how to build something devoted to life in such a destructive context, the rose returns with a new significance: “Our theory is the theory of the rose, a flower that defends itself,” said Çinar Sali a revolutionary organiser.

“Every being has to create methods of self-defense according to its own way of living, growing, and connecting with others. The aim is not to destroy an enemy but to force it to give up its intention to attack. Guerrilla fighters discuss this as a defensive strategy in a military sense, but it works in other areas as well. It’s a method of self-empowerment.”

The only thing I really want to point to with all this is that there is a vast array of characters in our stories of resistance that get forgotten. They’re different, weird, inspiring, baffling and beautiful. And we need to have their back. Because when everything feels hopeless, when we feel betrayed, alone, weak, they have always - seemingly unthinkingly - got ours.