redstar2000
16th April 2005, 01:54
I've been looking at some "blogs" while the board was down...and found this:
What do we do now? (http://shawnewald.blogspot.com/2005/03/what-do-we-do-now.html)
It's a polemic against the "subculture of protest" by someone who's been part of it for the last decade or so.
Many of the points he makes are difficult to argue against...as you will see. All of us who've been active in various movements will run into some familiar faces.
And yet...well, there are some problems here.
Originally posted by Shawn Ewald
I am writing this as someone who wants to win and who has grown unsentimental toward aspects of the activist world that, I think, prevent us from winning.
We "of the left" are very self-critical...or, more precisely, critical of one another. No matter which variant of "left" politics we participate in, we all have the natural tendency to think that if people would just really get behind "my ideas", then we "could win".
Is that true? If everyone in the "left" signed up with the DSA or the Green Party or the RCP or whoever, would the "left" win? In the foreseeable future, that is.
Ewald appears to think (at least partially) that "winning" is simply a matter of rejecting bad strategies in favor of good strategies...that the objective conditions in which we work have no effect on the outcome of the struggle.
Has it occurred to anyone that we (meaning the full broad spectrum of the Left) might be doing something wrong? I'm sure it has occurred to some, but from what I've seen, they're keeping mum about it.
It occurs to many "leftists" all the time. It's one of the most common activities on the "left"...the attempt to figure out what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. It's also among the most controversial, of course.
Now, having said that, it also must be said, in spite of all these forces arrayed against us and our own limitations, we collectively have a tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot before we ever enter the battle. What's worse, nearly every faction of the Left, with a few welcome exceptions here and there, are practically allergic to self-analysis and self-criticism of any depth. Still, there comes a point where, after witnessing failure after failure, any rational person would be forced to look inward and around themselves to determine whether what they were doing, or not doing, might play a part in why everything that we all have been doing just hasn't worked. I also think that people on the Left should ask themselves how we've arrived at this state of affairs after decades of gains through the first two thirds of the twentieth century.
It's a commonplace observation that self-criticism is a rarity. People are loath to criticize what they themselves have been doing or are doing; it's much easier to criticize others.
But there's a sense here of "once upon a time we were winners" and "now we're losers". I think that's something of a romanticization of the "left" in the past.
Had the "old left" made real gains in the past, would our situation in the present be as it is? Would it not be more historically accurate to say that the "old left" won some temporary and partial victories which it then promptly proceeded to piss away? Or that those "gains" were fundamentally unsustainable as long as the basic class structure of capitalism remained untouched?
I'm not calling for some kind of viper pit of recrimination, but for a serious pull-no-punches review of what we're doing, what we think, how we think, how we communicate with people outside of our activist milieu, and if any of this is really effective.
"Effectiveness" is a real thorn in the side of the "left". People engage in an enormous amount of controversy about how to measure it.
Let's start with protesting and direct action, the bread and butter of grassroots activism, and the default response to pretty much any issue that the Left wants to address. Frankly, I have come to question the value of protest as an effective means of social change. More to the point, I think protest and even what is often mistakenly called "direct action", as it is practiced on the Left, is often worse than useless, except when it is focused on a discrete, single-issue campaign. Generally I think protest as the sole expression of dissent is not nearly enough.
Fair enough. For protests to "work", they must be massive and continuous...and objective conditions must favor the demands of the protesters.
There's no getting around that last part...if the material cards are stacked against you, then you won't win, no matter how long you protest.
In the present period, are the "material cards stacked against us"?
However, if all you do is protest, if protesting constitutes the bulk of your activist work, what your protest shows is that your support is only skin deep. The fact that a group can get thousands out into the street really means very little at the end of the day if the people that show up are not involved in day to day struggle.
Here, I would agree. Large "ceremonial" protests that take place once or twice a year are well within the range of "acceptable dissent" in capitalist society.
Indeed, one could even argue that they offer a kind of "validation" of capitalist "democracy" -- see how "tolerant" we are of "lawful protest", etc.
To have even a small chance of success, protests must be geographically wide-spread and, more or less, continuous.
In a sense, the anti-globalization movement, the Anarchist movement, and a lot of other Left movements, share much in common with dead heads or renaissance fair geeks—they are self-organized mobile communities based on common interests. There can be a lot of solidarity within a community like that, but such communities are also extremely insular and out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, often willfully so.
Yes, that's largely if not completely true.
Why?
What's important about local activism is not that you're somehow down with the common folk, but that you view yourself as one of them. It's not about “helping” people like some missionary, but acting like a stakeholder who's going to be around for awhile and helping each other. Does any of this sound like something that the glory-hounds and rockstars, the adrenalin junkies and handcuff fetishists, the scenesters and gadflys in our movements could ever hope to be serious about?
I think I'm in the "gadfly caucus". :lol:
There are some interesting "subtexts" here.
One is the kind of "mindset" that develops among a rebellious minority. We are deeply alienated from the prevailing social order.
We're not "normal people"...by definition.
To attempt to pretend otherwise -- as an "organizing tool" -- is probably not workable.
That does not, of course, imply some kind of latent "superiority"...I suspect that it's mostly a matter of chance that determines who will drift into the "left" milieu and who will not. And, of course, just because someone happens to be in that milieu does not necessarily mean that their real ideas "are leftist".
When we talk about an activist who is not a labor organizer or a community organizer, we are talking about someone who not only has little experience dealing with ordinary people, but probably actively avoids dealing with ordinary people. In fact, such a person has probably spent a good deal of their lives actively running away from their ordinary families and their ordinary hometowns. People don't move to college towns and big cities to live amongst the common folk, they move there to live amongst other people like themselves...
Almost certainly true. Lefties, like nearly all humans, are "social animals" and want (even need) contact with like-minded folks.
Avoiding contact with non-leftists is also quite understandable; what can be discussed with people with whom you have so little in common? Raising serious political questions with such folks is a "mindfield"...unless you happen to be a really big guy that no one wants to fuck with.
My experience is that we talk to ordinary people in a very guarded fashion, trying to "feel them out". Only if we detect at least a spark of rebelliousness on their part do we start to "open up".
But seriously, the fact that there are places where people can be a part of a community that holds different values than the dominant culture is mostly a good thing, but these places also can (and do) serve as enclaves where people can escape the world and immerse themselves in their little scene. The fact that these lefty enclaves exist can be credited to the 'cultural revolution' of the 1960's and, to a much lesser extent, the DIY punk movement of the 70's and 80's. The Left has managed to carve out these enclaves for themselves but, instead of using these places as footholds for the spread of different values, they have served instead as protective cocoons, as ghettos.
Probably true in many cases...a left sub-culture of sufficient size fills the same role as a neighborhood or workplace. There's a limit to how many human inter-actions are possible in a given time-period...and if the sub-culture is large enough, that limit is reached.
If you have a partner, several close friends, a fair number of acquaintances, some interesting work to do, etc., then you are living "a full life".
That's true no matter what kind of sub-culture you live in...including the dominant one.
The trouble is that the Left wants to change America but they don't want to deal with all those icky, backward, reactionary people that make up the majority of the US population. Who among you wants to live in Harrisburg, PA when you can live in Ithaca, NY? Or Bakersfield, CA vs. Berkeley? Or Binghamton, NY vs. Brooklyn? I don't blame anyone who chooses to live in a place where they feel comfortable, I would choose the same way, but there is such a gulf between what was once called the counter-culture and the rest of the country that we may as well live on different planets. This isn't necessarily a strike against people who live in leftist enclaves, though these enclaves do tend to show the true face of the contemporary Left—educated, generally affluent, and mostly white. These places have all kinds of problems and contradictions, but the biggest problem they have regarding the stagnation of the Left is a general sense of contentment and self-satisfaction. After living in an enclave like this for awhile, it becomes easier to just stay within its boundaries and deal only with each other—people who generally share our values and beliefs. We all end up living in our own little world, our own little sub-culture, and dealing with people who do not believe what we believe becomes more and more problematic, it becomes easier to avoid these skirmishes with reality and just hide in the safe cocoon of the leftist ghetto.
Yes...though I question the "affluent" description. Nearly all the lefties I've ever known were pretty damn poor.
But the "subculture of protest" does "skirmish" with "reality" all the time...that's what protest is.
On occasion, we do engage the "ordinary people" who are part of the dominant culture...usually they are screaming matches and sometimes the confrontation is physical.
For many, it's an unpleasant experience and one therefore to be avoided. But activists accept it as "part of the package".
We carry around our outrage and our crazy ideas about how everything would be better if we all lived in a big happy commune or a socialist workers paradise and yet we have no clue how to communicate with the immigrant guy who bags our groceries at Whole Foods. To most leftists, the immigrant guy is not a person, he is a member of the oppressed, he is a recruitment opportunity, he is the object of their guilt, he is any number of things but he can never simply be a human being. Maybe he beats his wife? Maybe he hates black people? Maybe he's a raving religious fanatic? It's better to not get too close because it may spoil the illusion of a tidy black and white world that we have created.
I don't think those are very plausible explanations. The most likely reason for not "getting close" to the "immigrant guy" is that we don't speak his language (or speak it fluently).
Also, it's fairly difficult to "get close" to anyone in American society. We don't (with rare exceptions) even have communities any more. For most people, their extended social inter-actions are limited to members of their own families, a close friend or two, and possibly with their co-workers.
There is no more significant "public space" for any kind of extended encounter with an ordinary person...unless maybe a bar. Outside of the "subculture of protest", public meetings are very rare and the opportunities to raise dissident political views in such meetings even rarer.
For all their seeming "lack of effectiveness", it's our public protests and public meetings that give the ordinary person the opportunity to approach us because they see something attractive about our message.
Does anyone ever think about why it is that we have to go undercover as working class people to understand how working people live? Do we wonder why self-appointed representatives of the proletariat are able to pontificate to the Left about what we should be doing? Could there be a more obvious indication that we don't know what the fuck we're talking about when it comes to understanding what our fellow Americans think? The fact is, most of us are so comfortable in our sub-cultures and our scenes and our politically progressive, eco-friendly neighborhoods that we don't even know how to interact with someone who has no experience with the way of life we've adopted. When you reject the system, you inevitably disconnect yourself from the people who are still stuck in that system and who may not have the luxury of rejecting it. This is a difficult fact to face. What's good about the “counter-culture” is that it has the potential to point a way towards better ways of living; unfortunately, it has mostly become a self-serving, insular ghetto where we can willfully shut out the world. If our lefty hubs could be a place where ideas are born and grow instead of stagnate and atrophy, that could be the start of something useful.
I think the root of this complaint is that most "lefties" are not revolutionaries.
They've managed to find a niche that is reasonably comfortable...and see no need to look further.
Particularly since the task of revolution is...rather overwhelming just to contemplate.
Those who are revolutionaries or who aspire to become that do attempt to learn the concerns of ordinary people...but it's very "tough sledding".
How do you "reach out" to someone who does "beat his wife" or who does "hate black people" or who is "a religious fanatic"?
I think most people tend to care about things they actually need or use. Most people are absorbed with their own lives and if something doesn't affect them directly, they don't care. I think if we are going to expand the left and actually be effective again, we are going to have to work on projects that are useful to people and projects that people will want to be involved in.
Well, sure. But what of the multitude of pitfalls?
There are plenty of ordinary Americans right now who "want to be involved" in stopping illegal immigration or putting prayer back in the schools or...well, you know. The reactionary bullshit is so thick in this country (right now) that trying to even imagine a "useful project" that would nevertheless stay clear of the crap is...very difficult.
And even if you do think of one...how do you stop it from degenerating over time into just mindless do-goodism (reformism)? People may like and use the service that you provide and may like you for providing it...but do they draw any larger conclusions? Do they become radicalized?
We have all unconsciously resigned ourselves to having low expectations. We all have accepted the constraints of simple rebellion, of mere dissent, of harmless objection. The left as a whole is gripped by a culture of impotence. We talk, we complain, we rave, we rage, we snipe, but few of us build anything, we have grown so used to complaining that we don't know how to do anything else.
Well, I confess that I don't "feel constructive" -- simple rebellion is fine with me and I'd like to see a lot more of it before I start thinking about building anything other than better vehicles for stimulating and organizing more rebellion.
We have to focus on what we can do that actually helps right now. Claiming everything will be better and we'll all be happy after the revolution does not help anyone right now. Starting a community radio station, founding a clinic, starting after school programs, founding community centers, establishing credit unions, starting a co-op, starting a community supported agriculture program, starting an employee-owned enterprise, unionizing your workplace, even joining your local volunteer fire department, could help a lot sooner than any revolution that may or may not be down the road. Imagine if, in every city, activists chose one long term project to develop—maybe one of the examples listed above, or maybe something else—and that project became their primary activity for however many years it took until the project reached completion. Imagine also that these activists helped and encouraged other people in the community to start similar projects that involved anyone who wanted to participate and resulted in institutions that served the community. Imagine how even working on one major project could have a more positive impact on real people's lives than half a lifetime of holding signs and chanting. We have to stop waiting for things to get worse and start working to make things better. If we want to change this society, we have to start building the infrastructure that will take the place of the society we now live in.
I have nothing against "alternative institutions" in principle; I have noticed that their "radical impulse" shows a marked tendency to decline with age.
But you know that "alternative institutions" are also just another way to reinforce the "left sub-culture" and make the "left ghetto" even more attractive to those who are already so inclined.
I would never presume to tell people "not" to do stuff like that...but I think expectations should be realistic.
The world is not changed by co-ops.
And our purpose is not "to have a positive impact on people's lives" -- it's to abolish wage-slavery and class society forever.
We have to use all the tools at our disposal in order to make change happen: Direct action, civil disobedience, protests, lawsuits, lobbying, sabotage, ad campaigns, boycotts, or our own labor—all of these tools should be at the disposal of activists of any political persuasion...We need to be unsentimental about particular tactics and focus on what will actually get the job done in a particular situation.
Uncontroversial as written. But there's more complexity here than meets the eye.
The tactics we choose often send a different and much clearer message than simply what we say...if ordinary people notice us, they are much more likely to notice what we do than simply take our verbal message at face value.
The bottom line is we don't have time to be failures anymore. The earth is rapidly being made unlivable for most of humanity. Our country is run by bloodthirsty maniacs and there is no other force in the world to keep our empire building rulers in check. We owe it to ourselves and to the rest of humanity to bring down this imperial system. Dealing a death blow to this system is the best single thing we can do for all the victims of the American empire in this country and around the world. There has to be a better way to do it than the way we have been going about it.
This particular message, on its face, has a rather desperate if not despairing quality to it.
How can it be said that "we don't have time to be failures anymore"? Unless you want to posit an imminent collapse of the global ecology and the resultant extinction of the human species, then we have as much time as we need. If it takes another century or two to escape from class society, then that's what it takes.
To assert that "there has to be a better way" is a sentiment that I think every human has shared with regard to something at one time or another. It could be our "species' motto".
With regard to our present concerns, I do not know if there is "a better way" or not...or even if there's any way at all.
Marx could turn out, after all, to have been fundamentally wrong and the bourgeois "scientists" who say that humans are doomed to hierarchy and exploitation could turn out to be right.
A dismal scenario, indeed.
The assumption that "I operate on" is that Marx was right and that the "subculture of protest" will grow under suitable material conditions until it does reach the point of being able to effectively overthrow class society and all that goes with it. I think there is at least fragmentary evidence to support that hypothesis...and (thus far) no really compelling evidence against it.
It's true, though, I do incline to "take the long view"...a position with which many are in vigorous disagreement.
We'll see who's right.
http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif
What do we do now? (http://shawnewald.blogspot.com/2005/03/what-do-we-do-now.html)
It's a polemic against the "subculture of protest" by someone who's been part of it for the last decade or so.
Many of the points he makes are difficult to argue against...as you will see. All of us who've been active in various movements will run into some familiar faces.
And yet...well, there are some problems here.
Originally posted by Shawn Ewald
I am writing this as someone who wants to win and who has grown unsentimental toward aspects of the activist world that, I think, prevent us from winning.
We "of the left" are very self-critical...or, more precisely, critical of one another. No matter which variant of "left" politics we participate in, we all have the natural tendency to think that if people would just really get behind "my ideas", then we "could win".
Is that true? If everyone in the "left" signed up with the DSA or the Green Party or the RCP or whoever, would the "left" win? In the foreseeable future, that is.
Ewald appears to think (at least partially) that "winning" is simply a matter of rejecting bad strategies in favor of good strategies...that the objective conditions in which we work have no effect on the outcome of the struggle.
Has it occurred to anyone that we (meaning the full broad spectrum of the Left) might be doing something wrong? I'm sure it has occurred to some, but from what I've seen, they're keeping mum about it.
It occurs to many "leftists" all the time. It's one of the most common activities on the "left"...the attempt to figure out what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. It's also among the most controversial, of course.
Now, having said that, it also must be said, in spite of all these forces arrayed against us and our own limitations, we collectively have a tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot before we ever enter the battle. What's worse, nearly every faction of the Left, with a few welcome exceptions here and there, are practically allergic to self-analysis and self-criticism of any depth. Still, there comes a point where, after witnessing failure after failure, any rational person would be forced to look inward and around themselves to determine whether what they were doing, or not doing, might play a part in why everything that we all have been doing just hasn't worked. I also think that people on the Left should ask themselves how we've arrived at this state of affairs after decades of gains through the first two thirds of the twentieth century.
It's a commonplace observation that self-criticism is a rarity. People are loath to criticize what they themselves have been doing or are doing; it's much easier to criticize others.
But there's a sense here of "once upon a time we were winners" and "now we're losers". I think that's something of a romanticization of the "left" in the past.
Had the "old left" made real gains in the past, would our situation in the present be as it is? Would it not be more historically accurate to say that the "old left" won some temporary and partial victories which it then promptly proceeded to piss away? Or that those "gains" were fundamentally unsustainable as long as the basic class structure of capitalism remained untouched?
I'm not calling for some kind of viper pit of recrimination, but for a serious pull-no-punches review of what we're doing, what we think, how we think, how we communicate with people outside of our activist milieu, and if any of this is really effective.
"Effectiveness" is a real thorn in the side of the "left". People engage in an enormous amount of controversy about how to measure it.
Let's start with protesting and direct action, the bread and butter of grassroots activism, and the default response to pretty much any issue that the Left wants to address. Frankly, I have come to question the value of protest as an effective means of social change. More to the point, I think protest and even what is often mistakenly called "direct action", as it is practiced on the Left, is often worse than useless, except when it is focused on a discrete, single-issue campaign. Generally I think protest as the sole expression of dissent is not nearly enough.
Fair enough. For protests to "work", they must be massive and continuous...and objective conditions must favor the demands of the protesters.
There's no getting around that last part...if the material cards are stacked against you, then you won't win, no matter how long you protest.
In the present period, are the "material cards stacked against us"?
However, if all you do is protest, if protesting constitutes the bulk of your activist work, what your protest shows is that your support is only skin deep. The fact that a group can get thousands out into the street really means very little at the end of the day if the people that show up are not involved in day to day struggle.
Here, I would agree. Large "ceremonial" protests that take place once or twice a year are well within the range of "acceptable dissent" in capitalist society.
Indeed, one could even argue that they offer a kind of "validation" of capitalist "democracy" -- see how "tolerant" we are of "lawful protest", etc.
To have even a small chance of success, protests must be geographically wide-spread and, more or less, continuous.
In a sense, the anti-globalization movement, the Anarchist movement, and a lot of other Left movements, share much in common with dead heads or renaissance fair geeks—they are self-organized mobile communities based on common interests. There can be a lot of solidarity within a community like that, but such communities are also extremely insular and out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, often willfully so.
Yes, that's largely if not completely true.
Why?
What's important about local activism is not that you're somehow down with the common folk, but that you view yourself as one of them. It's not about “helping” people like some missionary, but acting like a stakeholder who's going to be around for awhile and helping each other. Does any of this sound like something that the glory-hounds and rockstars, the adrenalin junkies and handcuff fetishists, the scenesters and gadflys in our movements could ever hope to be serious about?
I think I'm in the "gadfly caucus". :lol:
There are some interesting "subtexts" here.
One is the kind of "mindset" that develops among a rebellious minority. We are deeply alienated from the prevailing social order.
We're not "normal people"...by definition.
To attempt to pretend otherwise -- as an "organizing tool" -- is probably not workable.
That does not, of course, imply some kind of latent "superiority"...I suspect that it's mostly a matter of chance that determines who will drift into the "left" milieu and who will not. And, of course, just because someone happens to be in that milieu does not necessarily mean that their real ideas "are leftist".
When we talk about an activist who is not a labor organizer or a community organizer, we are talking about someone who not only has little experience dealing with ordinary people, but probably actively avoids dealing with ordinary people. In fact, such a person has probably spent a good deal of their lives actively running away from their ordinary families and their ordinary hometowns. People don't move to college towns and big cities to live amongst the common folk, they move there to live amongst other people like themselves...
Almost certainly true. Lefties, like nearly all humans, are "social animals" and want (even need) contact with like-minded folks.
Avoiding contact with non-leftists is also quite understandable; what can be discussed with people with whom you have so little in common? Raising serious political questions with such folks is a "mindfield"...unless you happen to be a really big guy that no one wants to fuck with.
My experience is that we talk to ordinary people in a very guarded fashion, trying to "feel them out". Only if we detect at least a spark of rebelliousness on their part do we start to "open up".
But seriously, the fact that there are places where people can be a part of a community that holds different values than the dominant culture is mostly a good thing, but these places also can (and do) serve as enclaves where people can escape the world and immerse themselves in their little scene. The fact that these lefty enclaves exist can be credited to the 'cultural revolution' of the 1960's and, to a much lesser extent, the DIY punk movement of the 70's and 80's. The Left has managed to carve out these enclaves for themselves but, instead of using these places as footholds for the spread of different values, they have served instead as protective cocoons, as ghettos.
Probably true in many cases...a left sub-culture of sufficient size fills the same role as a neighborhood or workplace. There's a limit to how many human inter-actions are possible in a given time-period...and if the sub-culture is large enough, that limit is reached.
If you have a partner, several close friends, a fair number of acquaintances, some interesting work to do, etc., then you are living "a full life".
That's true no matter what kind of sub-culture you live in...including the dominant one.
The trouble is that the Left wants to change America but they don't want to deal with all those icky, backward, reactionary people that make up the majority of the US population. Who among you wants to live in Harrisburg, PA when you can live in Ithaca, NY? Or Bakersfield, CA vs. Berkeley? Or Binghamton, NY vs. Brooklyn? I don't blame anyone who chooses to live in a place where they feel comfortable, I would choose the same way, but there is such a gulf between what was once called the counter-culture and the rest of the country that we may as well live on different planets. This isn't necessarily a strike against people who live in leftist enclaves, though these enclaves do tend to show the true face of the contemporary Left—educated, generally affluent, and mostly white. These places have all kinds of problems and contradictions, but the biggest problem they have regarding the stagnation of the Left is a general sense of contentment and self-satisfaction. After living in an enclave like this for awhile, it becomes easier to just stay within its boundaries and deal only with each other—people who generally share our values and beliefs. We all end up living in our own little world, our own little sub-culture, and dealing with people who do not believe what we believe becomes more and more problematic, it becomes easier to avoid these skirmishes with reality and just hide in the safe cocoon of the leftist ghetto.
Yes...though I question the "affluent" description. Nearly all the lefties I've ever known were pretty damn poor.
But the "subculture of protest" does "skirmish" with "reality" all the time...that's what protest is.
On occasion, we do engage the "ordinary people" who are part of the dominant culture...usually they are screaming matches and sometimes the confrontation is physical.
For many, it's an unpleasant experience and one therefore to be avoided. But activists accept it as "part of the package".
We carry around our outrage and our crazy ideas about how everything would be better if we all lived in a big happy commune or a socialist workers paradise and yet we have no clue how to communicate with the immigrant guy who bags our groceries at Whole Foods. To most leftists, the immigrant guy is not a person, he is a member of the oppressed, he is a recruitment opportunity, he is the object of their guilt, he is any number of things but he can never simply be a human being. Maybe he beats his wife? Maybe he hates black people? Maybe he's a raving religious fanatic? It's better to not get too close because it may spoil the illusion of a tidy black and white world that we have created.
I don't think those are very plausible explanations. The most likely reason for not "getting close" to the "immigrant guy" is that we don't speak his language (or speak it fluently).
Also, it's fairly difficult to "get close" to anyone in American society. We don't (with rare exceptions) even have communities any more. For most people, their extended social inter-actions are limited to members of their own families, a close friend or two, and possibly with their co-workers.
There is no more significant "public space" for any kind of extended encounter with an ordinary person...unless maybe a bar. Outside of the "subculture of protest", public meetings are very rare and the opportunities to raise dissident political views in such meetings even rarer.
For all their seeming "lack of effectiveness", it's our public protests and public meetings that give the ordinary person the opportunity to approach us because they see something attractive about our message.
Does anyone ever think about why it is that we have to go undercover as working class people to understand how working people live? Do we wonder why self-appointed representatives of the proletariat are able to pontificate to the Left about what we should be doing? Could there be a more obvious indication that we don't know what the fuck we're talking about when it comes to understanding what our fellow Americans think? The fact is, most of us are so comfortable in our sub-cultures and our scenes and our politically progressive, eco-friendly neighborhoods that we don't even know how to interact with someone who has no experience with the way of life we've adopted. When you reject the system, you inevitably disconnect yourself from the people who are still stuck in that system and who may not have the luxury of rejecting it. This is a difficult fact to face. What's good about the “counter-culture” is that it has the potential to point a way towards better ways of living; unfortunately, it has mostly become a self-serving, insular ghetto where we can willfully shut out the world. If our lefty hubs could be a place where ideas are born and grow instead of stagnate and atrophy, that could be the start of something useful.
I think the root of this complaint is that most "lefties" are not revolutionaries.
They've managed to find a niche that is reasonably comfortable...and see no need to look further.
Particularly since the task of revolution is...rather overwhelming just to contemplate.
Those who are revolutionaries or who aspire to become that do attempt to learn the concerns of ordinary people...but it's very "tough sledding".
How do you "reach out" to someone who does "beat his wife" or who does "hate black people" or who is "a religious fanatic"?
I think most people tend to care about things they actually need or use. Most people are absorbed with their own lives and if something doesn't affect them directly, they don't care. I think if we are going to expand the left and actually be effective again, we are going to have to work on projects that are useful to people and projects that people will want to be involved in.
Well, sure. But what of the multitude of pitfalls?
There are plenty of ordinary Americans right now who "want to be involved" in stopping illegal immigration or putting prayer back in the schools or...well, you know. The reactionary bullshit is so thick in this country (right now) that trying to even imagine a "useful project" that would nevertheless stay clear of the crap is...very difficult.
And even if you do think of one...how do you stop it from degenerating over time into just mindless do-goodism (reformism)? People may like and use the service that you provide and may like you for providing it...but do they draw any larger conclusions? Do they become radicalized?
We have all unconsciously resigned ourselves to having low expectations. We all have accepted the constraints of simple rebellion, of mere dissent, of harmless objection. The left as a whole is gripped by a culture of impotence. We talk, we complain, we rave, we rage, we snipe, but few of us build anything, we have grown so used to complaining that we don't know how to do anything else.
Well, I confess that I don't "feel constructive" -- simple rebellion is fine with me and I'd like to see a lot more of it before I start thinking about building anything other than better vehicles for stimulating and organizing more rebellion.
We have to focus on what we can do that actually helps right now. Claiming everything will be better and we'll all be happy after the revolution does not help anyone right now. Starting a community radio station, founding a clinic, starting after school programs, founding community centers, establishing credit unions, starting a co-op, starting a community supported agriculture program, starting an employee-owned enterprise, unionizing your workplace, even joining your local volunteer fire department, could help a lot sooner than any revolution that may or may not be down the road. Imagine if, in every city, activists chose one long term project to develop—maybe one of the examples listed above, or maybe something else—and that project became their primary activity for however many years it took until the project reached completion. Imagine also that these activists helped and encouraged other people in the community to start similar projects that involved anyone who wanted to participate and resulted in institutions that served the community. Imagine how even working on one major project could have a more positive impact on real people's lives than half a lifetime of holding signs and chanting. We have to stop waiting for things to get worse and start working to make things better. If we want to change this society, we have to start building the infrastructure that will take the place of the society we now live in.
I have nothing against "alternative institutions" in principle; I have noticed that their "radical impulse" shows a marked tendency to decline with age.
But you know that "alternative institutions" are also just another way to reinforce the "left sub-culture" and make the "left ghetto" even more attractive to those who are already so inclined.
I would never presume to tell people "not" to do stuff like that...but I think expectations should be realistic.
The world is not changed by co-ops.
And our purpose is not "to have a positive impact on people's lives" -- it's to abolish wage-slavery and class society forever.
We have to use all the tools at our disposal in order to make change happen: Direct action, civil disobedience, protests, lawsuits, lobbying, sabotage, ad campaigns, boycotts, or our own labor—all of these tools should be at the disposal of activists of any political persuasion...We need to be unsentimental about particular tactics and focus on what will actually get the job done in a particular situation.
Uncontroversial as written. But there's more complexity here than meets the eye.
The tactics we choose often send a different and much clearer message than simply what we say...if ordinary people notice us, they are much more likely to notice what we do than simply take our verbal message at face value.
The bottom line is we don't have time to be failures anymore. The earth is rapidly being made unlivable for most of humanity. Our country is run by bloodthirsty maniacs and there is no other force in the world to keep our empire building rulers in check. We owe it to ourselves and to the rest of humanity to bring down this imperial system. Dealing a death blow to this system is the best single thing we can do for all the victims of the American empire in this country and around the world. There has to be a better way to do it than the way we have been going about it.
This particular message, on its face, has a rather desperate if not despairing quality to it.
How can it be said that "we don't have time to be failures anymore"? Unless you want to posit an imminent collapse of the global ecology and the resultant extinction of the human species, then we have as much time as we need. If it takes another century or two to escape from class society, then that's what it takes.
To assert that "there has to be a better way" is a sentiment that I think every human has shared with regard to something at one time or another. It could be our "species' motto".
With regard to our present concerns, I do not know if there is "a better way" or not...or even if there's any way at all.
Marx could turn out, after all, to have been fundamentally wrong and the bourgeois "scientists" who say that humans are doomed to hierarchy and exploitation could turn out to be right.
A dismal scenario, indeed.
The assumption that "I operate on" is that Marx was right and that the "subculture of protest" will grow under suitable material conditions until it does reach the point of being able to effectively overthrow class society and all that goes with it. I think there is at least fragmentary evidence to support that hypothesis...and (thus far) no really compelling evidence against it.
It's true, though, I do incline to "take the long view"...a position with which many are in vigorous disagreement.
We'll see who's right.
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