Let This Radicalize You

Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

Authors
Kelly Hayes
Mariame Kaba
Publisher
Haymarket Books
Year
2023
Collection
Liberation
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“Radical” means “pertaining to the root,” that is, the foundation or center of things, the point from which something grows. To be radicalized, then, is to attend to the root, to reach for that center, to refuse the easy distraction of the surface. Here, Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes draw from abolitionist thinking and mutual aid practices to crate a primer on what it means to organize—to draw down into that root and to invite others to join you in the struggle. Among the principles they articulate is one of rebellious care, that is, a care for each other and the living world that demands nothing less than rebellion against the systems of neglect and oppression that surround us. That intensity of care, that radical care, is a great power for making change, and the only thing that can sustain us through it.

Reading notes

Obligation to possibility

In Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write:

Governed by fear, people are largely cooperative with systems that produce torture, mass death, and annihilation. That is the greatest danger that fear poses: not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable—one that is actually poised to bring about our own extinction.

Hayes & Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, page 38

(Emphasis mine.) To cooperate is a core human capacity, a vital part of living and thriving in interdependence. That’s one of the ways fear works, by drawing on our innate desire to live and work together. But with whom are we cooperating? Which systems, which people?

As humans on Earth in these times, we are raised into a rigged game, traumatized by its violence, and coached to replicate its dynamics. We are surrounded by lies, illusions, and coercion. We are sold punishment as justice and annihilation as progress, and many people cannot imagine anything else. But just as we do not abandon people we love who are in crisis, we have not given up on humanity. We have witnessed transformation too often to dismiss its possibility, and we have an obligation to that possibility in individual lives and in large groups of people.

Hayes & Kaba, Let This Radicalize You, page 45

Or, to frame this a different way: which possibilities are we obligated to?