You can count on Jacobin to offer a grinch-like critique of a mass moment like New Year’s Day. And so they did, by republishing an essay from Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci.
“I hate these New Year’s,” Gramsci writes. “The date becomes an obstacle, a parapet that stops us from seeing that history continues to unfold along the same fundamental unchanging line, without abrupt stops.”
He argues for treating every day as a “New Year,” focusing on the continuities across calendar markers and the era boundaries we retrospectively overlay on our histories. I’ve argued something similar about other holidays, even though I still ride the social current and treat this season as my personal fourth quarter.
I thought of Gramsci’s essay while finishing Angela Davis’ book Freedom is a Constant Struggle this weekend.
In 2015, Davis told a Turkish audience that a feminist approach to justice required them to recognize the connections between oppressive patterns in history and in the present as well as within their culture and in others around the world.
Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.” —Angela Y. Davis
I cannot count the times I have read other communities’ histories and noticed commonalities and intersections with my own communities’ stories.
The colonization of Native peoples in the Americas has commonalities with the colonization of people of African descent across Africa and the Western Hemisphere. Genocides in Turkey share threads with genocides in Cambodia, Austria, and Bosnia. Private security and incarceration policies in Israel surface in South Africa and the United States and France and Britain.
Rather than tunneling exclusively into histories that obviously relate to me, I can learn so much by learning from other people’s stories too. Ultimately, as Davis argues, our histories are interwoven, and recognizing that allows us to build cross-community solidarity. Sustainable social progress depends on it.