Lumpen 142: Democrazy

As the Democratic National Convention (DNC) looms on the horizon for Chicago this summer, some draw analogies to the infamous 1968 Convention at the old Amphitheater, while others point to the relatively tame 1996 Convention at the United Center. Neither is on point. Chicago is a very different city than it was in ‘68 or ‘96, and the US is a different nation. Those differences make for a new dynamic.

Download the issue. ( PDF )

Lumpen 142 Contributions include:

Jex Blackmore, Jerry Boyle, Asaf Calderon, Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Liz Davis, Jeffrey Dorchen, Silvia Inés Gonzalez, Noah Karapanagiotidis, Ruslana Lichtzier, Brian M. Mier, Matt Muchowski, Hope-Lian Vinson

Comics and Art By: Linda Abdullah, Mac Blackout, Yanira Castro, Allie Drew, William Estrada, Victoria Garcia, Aaron Hughes, Joseph Josué Mora, Tafari Melisizwe, CHema Skandal!, Nick Jackson, Jeremy Tinder + Grant Reynolds, Lilac Watson + Aboriginal Activist GrouP

From the Introduction:

This Won’t Save Us: A Search for Repair

“Bad news friends, I’m not funny anymore,” writes Brynne Musser at the start of her voter guide, This Won’t Save Us: A Progressive’s Guide to Kansas City Elections. “This one really sucked the life out of me and I’ll just say that up front to lower expectations,” she adds. For each election Brynne provides an anti-cop, anti-corporation analysis of our municipal ballots using an ultra precise colored scoring system of “favorable” to “utter trash.” Candidates’ names are scattered throughout, at times finding themselves dumped in a cutout of Kansas City’s municipal waste bin. I’ve always found these guides to be funny, researched, and deeply honest about the limits of electoral politics. Indeed, it can be hard to feel excited about democracy lately. Like Stephanie Skora’s Girl, I Guess Progreesive Voter Guide, a Chicago-based voter guide meant to appeal to the Lefts’ increasing disillusionment with electoral politics, Brynne’s This Won’t Save Us was created with the deep understanding that we can not vote our way to liberation.

In this year’s Democrazy issue, contributors talk about conventions past (Jeffrey Dorchen), the failures of democracy, (Brian M. Mier and Ruslana Lichtzier), and its opportunities for radical intervention (Jerry Boyle and Matt Muchowski). In truth, “Democrazy” was a theme I initially resisted due to its implication that American democracy is only now taking a turn for the worse. It might be tempting to call this moment “crazy,” deriving from the Germanic crasen or craisen, or possibly Old Norse krasa meaning “to shatter, crush, break to pieces.” Indeed this moment is one that is breaking us as we witness one of the most visible and reported genocides happening in Palestine, with a conservative death toll of over 37,000 people that per capita exceeds all other major conflicts in modern history. Late U.S air force officer Aaron Bushnell proclaims, “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all” before setting fire to himself outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. However it would be reductive to talk about these extreme acts of protest without talking about the extreme conditions we live in. Jex Blackmore in The Burning Body: Martyrdom in the Liberation Movement writes, “By focusing solely on mental health, we fail to recognize the deliberate and calculated nature of these sacrifices. This evasion prevents us from addressing the underlying societal and systemic issues that contribute to their protest.”

So how do we begin to repair? To Silvia Inés Gonzalez and Melissa Ferrer-Civil, transformation happens through care. To heal is to address the day-to-day violence of racial capitalism and its effects on our collective health. It means pivoting away from the systems that don’t serve us and building something new. Abolition is about addressing the root causes of violence and its intersections with feminism, racism, queer liberation, decolonization, disability justice, and environmentalism. The impulse to reform broken structures instead of abolish them narrows our framework for true liberation. As explored by Liz Davis and Noah Karapanagiotidis, organizing is about changing the conditions of what’s possible through relationships, community, and collective struggle. Organizing naturally lends itself to relationship-driven models for building power, and collaboration and exchange are both critical and necessary to the survival of movement work.

This introduction is not meant to dissuade readers from participating in our upcoming election, nor is meant to dismiss electoral politics entirely. Rather, it is a search for repair in a moment that feels irreparable. In preparation for the DNC, I hope this year’s Lumpen Magazine agitates, mobilizes, and serves as a powerful toolkit for organizing. Between each flashpoint in history, we are moving, building, and learning together in preparation for the next crisis– because there will always, inevitably be a next.

— Hope-Lian Vinson