Across the leftist social internet, you see a common refrain: Read Octavia Butler. I agree: Octavia Butler was an astute observer of the political conditions that directly led us to the current moment, an investigator of the conditions of relation that we have inherited from our ancestors, and a powerful commentator on the road ahead. Her book The Parable of the Sower seems prophetic in its reflection of our reality, from the climate crisis and the economic precarity right on down to the “Make America Great Again” sloganeering and the Christo-fascist paramilitary movements.
I’ve seen plenty of new readers pick up The Parable of the Sower and stop there. And by stopping, they’re missing out on the depth of Butler’s analysis of governing power.
At the end of Sower, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, has survived a harrowing journey and succeeded in creating a haven in the ruins of a United States in free fall. But picking up The Parable of the Talents, the second book in what Butler planned to write as a much longer series before her untimely death, readers are faced with the backlash. The Earthseed community, striving to create a new world without having seized enough power to protect itself, is at the mercy of the reactionaries. And even at the end of the book, when Olamina’s vision has apparently come to fruition, the first Earthseed ship is, against her wishes, named Christopher Columbus–a reminder that governing power is not just about material resources or political power, but about narrative power as well.
What we learn from Highlander’s history
Grassroots Power Project defines governing power as “the power to design, legislate, implement and enforce a structural reform agenda and to defend those reforms until they can defend themselves.” They’re very specific that political and electoral power is a necessary, but not sufficient, element of power. Governing power also includes administrative power; narrative power; and the movement infrastructure to create deep alignment and drive a shared agenda.
In our own reality, we can look to the history of the Highlander Center to understand why this expanded view of governing power is critical, especially to the types of projects William Lawrence describes in “Planning for Failure: The Stakes Are Too High Not To.” I am very interested in the task of building alternative institutions. But we must not mistake those institutions for governing power itself: they need to be a vehicle for our efforts to build governing power, or they will be doomed to be vulnerable to our lack of it.
The first iteration of Highlander, then the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, was targeted as early as the 1950s as a training ground for very scary “anti-government Communists.” The attacks on the Highlander Folk School culminated in the State of Tennessee revoking its nonprofit charter in 1961, leading to forfeiture of the land. The state auctioned it off because no stockholders or owners could lay claim to the property as private individuals. This history highlights the ways in which governing power is about more than just winning elections–it’s about understanding and leveraging administrative and infrastructural power, too.
Today’s Highlander Center, located in New Market, Tennessee, where it relocated in 1971 after a decade in Knoxville, is a testament to the persistence and resilience of the organizing community in Tennessee and the broader Southeast. It’s been a critical gathering place for so many of our movements over the decades: I love hearing, and sharing my own, “first time at Highlander” stories.
But that’s also not the end of the story when it comes to the broader world bearing down on this beautiful place that has fostered so much learning, inspiration, and connection. Most readers will remember the 2019 arson that burnt down the Center’s main office, destroying more than a half century of movement documentation. The arsonists left behind white supremacist graffiti, making the message clear: our movements’ work to create racial solidarity and liberation for all people is under threat.
Sober assessment of risk
This is not to say that we shouldn’t make investments in creating new Highlander Centers, new Watershed Centers. We absolutely should. I’d even go so far as to argue that my work making Convergence Magazine into a sustainable independent media business falls squarely in line with what Lawrence is calling for: a media and political education resource and community of practice that has a high-quality product that, increasingly, readers are willing to pay for. We’re constantly trying on new ways of making the magazine into a more self-sustaining project through things like our subscriber program, for example. But to be honest, I take cold comfort in our roadmap to financial sustainability, because risk is risk. We’re far from hegemonic in any meaningful sense, so we’re very vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, both from the state and by non-state actors who have the implicit or explicit blessing of the state.
I align with Lawrence’s suggestion that we figure out ways to mitigate our risk and expand options in the face of mounting threats. It is key to our ongoing resilience. I simply think that we must account for what those risks are, and not overstate the ways in which investment in independent vehicles for our work insulates us from those risks. Be they political parties, publications, gathering spaces, or other infrastructure that moves the people and resources we’ll need to win, we need them all–and it’s exactly that need that means that they will be under threat.
Octavia Butler passed away before finishing the third Earthseed book, Parable of the Trickster, which she tried time and again to write in fits and starts. Gerry Canavan, the author of Octavia E. Butler, who was one of the first scholars to get into Butler’s archives at the Huntington Library, described it as “dozens upon dozens of false starts for the novel, some petering out after twenty or thirty pages, others after just two or three.” The story’s stub always involved a future Earthseed colony on a faraway planet, struggling with the fact that the planet was not the heaven they’d envisioned.
It strikes me that all these attempts to move the story forward involved Earthseed on a new world, struggling to make society anew, and getting stuck on the things that made them, invariably, human: vulnerable to a new environment, at the mercy of the ghosts of the old. Butler grappled deeply with the question of governing power and its many faces. The lessons of Earthseed–and those of building infrastructure for our movements in this life, too–are that we need to grapple with governing power, too. Otherwise our work to manage risk and build our resilience will be constantly overshadowed by the reactionary threat. In a time when the reactionaries have captured the state, the shadow they cast is long indeed.
Featured image: kimmiedearest.com for Convergence.