Some movement activists believe that whatever has been, had to be. To me, this is weird. On a large scale, suppose the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had missed. T-Rex and friends would might still be cavorting and you and I and our species might be unborn. Goodbye human history. Or suppose the dark ages hadn’t brightened. And but for a few events, it could indeed plausibly have lasted another couple of thousand years. That would have meant overwhelmingly different human history. Or suppose the Nazis had won World War Two. It could have happened. Much of the world might have emerged more or less as it did, but much else would have differed – so that too would have meant a somewhat different human history. However, these observations are not particularly informative for current movement practices.
In 2014 there is pain and suffering everywhere. Could our path, starting a half century ago and unfolding to the present have been quite different? Could different choices have dramatically altered our current situation? In the half century since 1964 could we have attained a vastly better situation. Had we made different choices, could we now be approaching liberated societies around the world?
Some take pleasure in answering this question “no.” They agree that things could have been worse due to worse choices. For example, if Khrushchev had been as irresponsible as the Kennedy brothers we could have had a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis. But they quickly add to that admission that while things could have been much worse due to people making worse choices, they could only have been marginally better due to people having made better choices. In that view, history’s flow is written in the material conditions of the times, and for this half century material conditions precluded doing much better than we did. For this perspective, then, no different movement actions, beliefs, or choices could have generated much greater success, because significantly better outcomes were simply unattainable.
When someone suggests that different movement choices could have accomplished more, people who gave their lives to those movements often rush to defend themselves and their allies. I have many friends for whom criticisms of the New Left Movements of the Sixties, or the No Nukes movement in the Eighties, or the most recent Occupy movements, just yesterday, and all the other movements interspersed over the past half century, hit them like body blows. They clench up and protect themselves. They frequently even lash out in reply.
My view may be no less subjectively driven than theirs, but it yields a very different attitude. I eagerly seek flaws in our past. I want to reveal that if we had made better choices, we would now be better off. I want myself and others to be in some sense culpable for the relative failure of the past half century – because that would mean that starting now, new actors could learn lessons and do better.
Suppose we achieved much less than we sought even though we were perfect in our efforts. Yes, we wouldn’t have to feel an iota responsible. However, there would be nothing for anyone to do better, next time. To me, that would be depressing.
So what went wrong? Was it nothing? Did my generation and those that followed over this past half century do all we could have done, and also do it as well as possible? Did we achieve less than we sought because it wasn’t in the stars to get better results? Or did we accomplish less than we sought because there were things we did that we could have done better, or things that we didn’t do but should have done?
If we want the truth to be that our choices could have been better so that others can take lessons and themselves do better, we should look to see if we can find what, in fact, could have been better. To find avenues for improvement is the point. And I am not talking about a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Kansas, or an errant Asteroid, helping us out. I don’t care about anything in any way beyond our means. I am asking, were there better choices that our past half century of movements could have made without us needing to have been different people, or needing to have been living in a more amenable context?
I have written about this many times, and I have offered many possibilities. Here I repeat a few, briefly, in hopes of spurring folks to think more deeply about this matter. The aim isn’t finding fault. The aim is doing better in the future.
It is like a sports team doing a post mortem on a bad season. The point isn’t, or shouldn’t be, to punish teammates psychologically or materially or any other way. The point should be to find areas for improvement. The purpose of the season’s post mortem should be future improvement, not past recrimination.
Going back fifty years, and considering every step thereafter, I think we could have been far more intelligently “intersectional.” It shouldn’t have taken decades of graduate academics to see what was in front of our nose. It required, instead, just a willingness to see, well, what was in front of one’s nose. Civil rights activists, anti war activists, feminist activists, labor and anti capitalist activists, environmental activists, fifty years ago, and ever since, could easily have seen – as some did – that the dynamics of racial, gender, sexual, power, class and ecological institutional arrangements each exist in context of all the rest. We could have noticed this in our own experiences, and in the experiences of others. We could have realized that we couldn’t fully understand the situation of an individual based on looking at influences from only one or two of these dimensions of life without also accounting for the rest and their mutually enforcing and sometimes contradictory implications. Even more important, we could have recognized that the stronger any one of these realms of influence is, the more likely its effects will pervade all other realms to the point that the other realms reinforce the first. If gender dynamics are really powerful – as they are – then they will impact all other dimensions of social life, including molding those other dimensions to accord with and even to continually reproduce sexism. And we could have realized that that means that to address sexism successfully, one has to not only address explicitly gender relations and institutions, but also economic, political, and cultural institutions and relations, because gender will have impacted all those other domains to the point where they too produce sexist outcomes. Similarly, we could have realized that if class is really important -as it is – then to address class successfully we will have to not only explicitly address economic institutions, but also gender, political, and cultural, institutions, because, again, class pressures will have molded all those other dimensions to in turn produce classist results. The upshot, taking into account issues of race and power too, which we could have understood and acted on starting fifty years ago, was to realize that to focus a movement on exclusively one area and to then have all movements more or less compete side by side – as we have – rather than each movement mutually intersecting and reinforcing the rest in serious, sustained, and deep mutual solidarity, was a recipe for defeat. Could that realization have fueled better results? I think it could have.
Similarly, we could have listened when people asked us, over and over, starting fifty years ago and then every year since, what do you want? Sometimes, this was just oppression-defenders saying, you can’t be radical, you can’t protest Vietnam, you can’t protest racism and sexism, you can’t protest nukes and whatever else, because you have no alternative – so shut up. Other times, however, it was just honest people, saying, okay, we understand what you are upset about. We are upset too, but we see no way to live that won’t involve injustice and deprivation of the sort you don’t like but which you have no solutions for. So, if you want us to pay attention to your agendas, if you want us to lend our energies, give us some hope, give us some reason to believe, give us some incentive to take a risk. By and large we didn’t provide the hope, the reason to believe, and the incentives to take risks, and while with each new movement upsurge our numbers grew for a time, the growth was not nearly enough, and with every upsurge instead of initial growth being sustained, growth tailed off. Would our being able to compellingly enunciate vision have made a big difference? I believe it would have.
We could also have taken seriously the incredibly prevalent mood that you can’t fight city hall. This extends the prior point. Even if someone comes to think there is an alternative way to organize society and live, and even if he or she takes hope and orientation from the vision – there is still a big obstructive elephant in the way of the person actually participating. For most people, quite reasonably, the immobilizing thought runs like this. If we can’t beat the rich and powerful who defend injustice, what is the point of fighting them? Even if there is a better future in theory, even if I would love to help attain that better future, if there isn’t a better future in practice because there is no path to reach it, I see no reason to fight. Leave me alone. Over the paste five decades our movements haven’t had much to say about vision, certainly not in comprehensible language that compellingly addresses real issues. But our movements also didn’t say much about strategy for winning a new world. If we had had strategy, arising from and justifying vision, how many more people would we have inspired? How many more people would have lent some of their time and creativity, and by their efforts in turn attracted others, and then more others, and so on? This was not beyond possibility. We just didn’t do it.
More, when the little that we said about why an alternative could be viable and worthy, and the little that we said about broad strategy, was together actually enough to induce in some people real interest, next we could have answered far more supportively when many of them sincerely asked – but what can I personally do that would matter? In other words, a person could agree that there is a possible, viable, worthy, and even incredibly desirable future. And a person could agree there is a plausible way to get to it, writ large, supposing enough people get on board. But the same person could nonetheless feel, what can I do, personally, given my limited resources and time, that would make a difference? And we could have done much more to address that question too, I think, not just with compelling ideas and program they could relate to, but with supportive mechanisms to let people find their own additional and other ways to contribute.
As one last thing to list here, and perhaps the main thing – even – we could have taken all the above gains, had we accomplished them far more fully, or even to the limited extent that we did accomplish them, and we could have worked to preserve them structurally. We could have built radical institutions addressing health care in a community, accessing food in a neighborhood, daily education in ways , publishing, and so on, embodying, reflecting, and enlarging the intersectional, visionary, and strategic insights – and we could also have built institutions geared to engage in political and social struggle that would also embody the intersectional, visionary, strategic, and day to day mutually supportive innovations mentioned above, giving them structural basis and continuity.
No doubt there are many other things we might consider. The thing is, we are locked into a struggle with an implacable, immoral, and anything goes enemy. We can’t just make choice after choice, day to day, never assessing our results, never refining our reasoning, never trying to solidify our gains. We also can’t just dump past approaches tout court, as if doing something completely and totally different will automatically mean we have escaped past flaws without ever even admitting, identifying, and evaluating them.
We can’t win without inspiring. We can’t win without marshaling energies effectively. When we make mistakes, especially big ones, we need to own up so as to do better. It is precisely that approach, carefully finding flaws and correcting them – and not making believe our past was flawless or, for that matter, that it was nothing but flaws – that can make our earlier efforts part of a long trajectory toward winning.
The good news is that a lot that we did over the past fifty years has been flawed, incomplete, inconsistent, and even wrong headed. It is good news because it means new generations can do better. But new generations won’t do better by throwing out everything and then adopting new methods without careful thought. OR by repeating the past tout court. Rather new generations will only do better by finding what was flawed, by understanding why it was flawed, and then by self consciously and carefully doing better. We should not ignore the past. We should not make believe it was without flaws. We should not make believe it was nothing but flaws. We should pay attention, and think.
ZNetwork je financovaný výlučne zo štedrosti svojich čitateľov.
darovať
4 Komentáre
Hi Micheal. Here you argue that different understandings and intentions in the movement in huge past could have lead to significantly more success. You list providing vision, providing stategy, supporting involvement in diverse ways, and building lasting institutions. My question is, to what extent were people not trying to do this? For vision I see people had little intention to do anything. For the others it’s not so clear to me. In particular, wasn’t it recognised by many people that lasting structures were necessary? While you can disagree with how they suggest going about it, Tradition anti capitalist approaches and other grassroots campaigners all seem to want this. What do you have in mind here? Isn’t it more the case that people’s ideas about lasting structures (like vanguard parties propping up transient united-front operations) were not optimal?
I guess I would say the effort at offering strategy was overwhelmingly short term…not something that could inform hope of possibility of attaining a better world – and regarding building organization – well, I think I said organization that embodied the other gains.
Also, that a relative few were doing x, say, doesn’t negate that most were not, and were even hostile to such efforts…
You are quite right that there were “classical” marxist leninist style efforts over the course of the decades noted in the article. I agree with you it was not optimal, to be very generous, but regardless, it was relatively small – arguably even just sidebar to the broad movements of the times.
Hau Mitakuyepi, Greetings my Relatives, I appreciate the depth of this discussion regarding what went wrong. My People (Lakota Oyate kin, the Friendly People) having a so-called oral tradition, consider truth-telling to be a crucial matter not only for the continuance of the People/Nation but for the strengthening of our kinship with All Life. Even today, when relating our dreams to our friends, family, community, we are reminded to “Tell it straight, don’t add anything, don’t leave anything out. Regarding vision/dreams, to not tell it straight is a dangerous thing, to the individual’s own kinship with the spirit who has sent a vision/dream, to one’s friends and relatives who help the dreamer fulfill his/her obligations. And too the People (esp. now living under genocidal oppression as we do nowadays) are strengthened or weakened by our “telling it straight”!
Not an easy thing to do, hasn’t ever been, never will be. It begins within the individual and moves outward in ever greater relational circles –and back again! A simple teaching, age-old, non-western, right here in the U.S.A. The genocidal oppression that I mentioned is going on here in the u.s.a. Nowadays the crime of Genocide is applied to mostly non-white nation states. Genocide is a powerful word so I’m compelled to tell it straight. The Original Peoples (human&non-human) of Turtle Island are undergoing genocide. This genocide is not “historical”, meaning “in the past”. Having been normalized, legalized, denied perhaps you can see why the American psyche seems incapable of acknowledging the genocide/omnicide it is committing. I see that the World’s Moral Policeman is a shame-bound perpetrator of the worst crimes against humanity. It’s insane; the freest, richest, greatest nation state ever, can’t tell it straight!
I’m a fifty-nine year old male, I’ve suffered, I’m suffering, genocide in this lifetime –under the noses of a misled, misinformed, deluded, american citizenry. The normalizing euphemisms for this genocide are called Indian Law, Federal Indian Policy. Like nazi germany, the u.s. has documented it all, even codified it –minutely– yet American Genocide is invisible. What kind of wrong is that? I can hear apologists muttering about “human nature” and “Indians were always fighting over land before we came”! Those lies won’t work anymore. We Original Peoples are enduring the greatest genocide in western history, world history, ever! The pathological effects are undeniable to us, we want to live so we must see it for what it is and struggle and strive to tell it straight!
CORE PRINCIPLES OF ORGANICITY
1. Nature is all there is, was, or ever will be.
2. A fundamental attribute of nature is life.
3. A fundamental attribute of life is self optimization.
4. The distinction between animate and inanimate is a false one. Life pervades all of nature in varying degrees of potentiality.
5. The distinction between humans and animals is a false one. Humans are animals. Life manifests itself in all organisms in varying degrees of intensity and self consciousness.
6. There appears to be two opposed impulses embedded in nature. On the one hand, life, evolving from the good towards the better for itself and on the other hand, entropy, or disintegration, which is against life.
7. As finite beings ourselves, we tend to conclude that in the end, one of these, evolution or entropy, must finally triumph, annihilating the other. But in fact there will be no end, because nature, time, space, movement, change and diversity are all infinite, with no beginning and no end.
8. The life of an organism consists of a birth, life, and death. But each birth is a new creation and each death feeds new life. Births and deaths are equally necessary to the sustaining of living systems.
9. The fact that every individual organism may resemble its parents does not detract from its uniqueness. Nature never repeats itself precisely. Perfection is a myth, or rather the perfection of nature lies only in its infinite diversity.
10. Predominantly, males and females search for the most attractive specimen of the other and reach the height of pleasure, joy, happiness and well-being in the sexual climax that each brings to the other. The by-product may or may not be the birth of another unique individual.
11. Machines reproduce. Organisms recreate, or more accurately, procreate.
12. Modernity has diverted the natural human desire to please and be pleased by contact or association with other humans, into a lust for the possession of manufactured objects.
13. This diversion of energies into the acquisition of material objects has had the cumulative effect of cutting us off from each other as well as from our fellow animals and plants with whom we evolved.
14. In our efforts to build robots more and more like ourselves we have not noticed how robotic we ourselves have become. With disastrous results.