Zen and the art of social movement maintenance | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Kabat-Zinn’s work appears to vindicate Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Western Buddhism as a supplement to neoliberal capitalism: “It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.”
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But Davis has seen the benefits of mind/body practices and is not so swift to dismiss them. How can mindfulness genuinely support social justice? This was the basic question she kept returning to in Oakland.“In a racially unjust world,” Davis earnestly asked Kabat-Zinn, “what good is mindfulness?”
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While the brief discussion between Davis and Kabat-Zinn remained abstract, actually existing experiments at the intersection of mindfulness and social change are blossoming. Several organizations are now focusing their efforts on the fold between subjective and social change: the Center for Transformative Change, Generative Somatics and the Movement Strategy Center are three leaders.
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Practices like yoga and meditation were woven throughout Occupy, and were integral to its endurance and impact; they were not a sideshow.
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Meditation and yoga, however, do not automatically nurture an anti-racist and egalitarian ethos. If they did, Western practice communities would be sanctuaries from what bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” As hooks has noted, based on her experience as a Buddhist and a woman of color, exclusions along multiple axes of oppression — such as race and class — continue to shape the dissemination of meditation and yoga in the West.
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During conversations with Occupy activists, I learned that, while short meditations like moments of silence were used by assembly facilitators in the early days of the camp, the practice became more common as the occupation continued, and challenges intensified.
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“As decision-making processes began breaking down,” facilitator Marisa Holmes explained to me, “with more disruption coming from within the camp, from the state, from all angles, we used these practices more and more.”
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While grounding exercises helped ease aggression and facilitate communication among Occupiers, they could not stop the violent eviction executed by the New York Police Department in November 2011. They were also unable to transform debilitating internal conflicts that weakened the occupation. At the root of these conflicts, many activists believed, was the fundamental disagreement over whether and how Occupiers should engage with structures of power, including more established institutions on the left, like unions.
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“I think a lot of mistakes resulted from the inability to engage with power, interact with it and build strategies around how to shift it,” said journalist Nathan Schneider, who is an editor-at-large for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.”
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Many of the participants in Occupy Manifest became leaders in the Occupy Sandy relief effort after the superstorm hit New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Occupy Sandy was tremendously successful in its response, using social media to quickly raise over $1 million and mobilize 60,000 volunteers — four times the number of volunteers engaged by the Red Cross. A key element of Occupy Sandy’s success was participants’ willingness to work across political differences, coordinating activities with churches, FEMA and other relief organizations that didn’t necessarily share Occupy’s values and horizontalist style of organizing.
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During their dialogue, Jon Kabat-Zinn noted his original skepticism towards Davis’s radical stance on prison abolition. “But then you gave me your book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete,’ and I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a fantastic idea.”Mindfulness alone will not spark a political revolution, but when joined by actual revolutionaries, it might expand all of our possibilities for freedom.