the need to care

diary entry, november 19

Yesterday I participated in a workshop with the Visionary Organizing Lab. Without turning this post into an infomercial, they’re are awesome folks who - well, I’ll use their words:

teach Visionary Organizing, an approach to change that equally emphasizes our material needs and non-material needs. We believe that when we learn to equally emphasize our material and non-material needs, we begin to exist in ways that allow us to create communities, organizations, and institutions that allow us to thrive in partnership with others and the Earth.

Visionary Organizing probably appeals to me because it proposes ways to undo our system of patriarchal racial capitalism¹ that don’t fall back on the kind of revolutionary tropes you often hear.² I’m kind of a shitty revolutionary that way. The VOL workshops also appeal to me because they tend to be rooted in historical fact as opposed to inventing a present and a future based on theories cooked up in a lab.

In the workshop last night, I was writing, in response to a prompt, about a non-material need that had been met yesterday. The moment that came to mind was when I was in a meeting and helped the group - members of two groups, really, but the details don’t matter. My contributions helped get us unstuck. It felt good. I felt useful.

It’s kind of obvious, I suppose. The need to be valuable. One of the things I hated about my last role at the Death Star was how little value I was contributing. I watched myself as my talents were wasted, day in and day out, sitting at a desk reading emails and checking on whether people had completed their assigned quotas. Anyone could do that work. Honestly, no one could do that work, and it would be just fine, too. And all this assumes the work I was supervising was worth doing, which it mostly wasn’t except in a fig-leaf, keep the regulator happy kind of way.

Again, the details don’t matter. The point is, prior to last night’s workshop I had been thinking of non-material needs in a kind of “incoming” way: What is the world providing me that I need? Afterward, last night and today, I have been reflecting on our “outgoing” needs (which may by definition be non-material). The need to care for others. The need to express love, not just receive it. The need to make positive contributions to a task or a project. Giving birth and raising children. The ability to give.

Maybe these things are obvious; maybe I’m just self-centered. I doubt it, though, if only because I’ve been in VOL workshops where participants struggled to accept any sort of non-material need as a need.

Maybe these things are obvious, but it seems important to remind ourselves of them right now.

1. I can’t find a simple definition of patriarchal racial capitalism. You might have to take a VOL workshop.

2. Maybe you don’t often hear them. I do.