In which Alexandra Voline, Andre Goldman, and Senator Malcolm King discuss with their interviewer, Miguel Guevara, the first major march, the early boycotts, overcoming early resistance, and achieving early momentum.

[Author’s Note: This is the second excerpt from a work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This chapter will also provide the substance for a forthcoming RevolutionZ episode titled, NAR 2: First Breaths. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections, questions, comments, elaborations, clarifications, whatever, made by the host on hearing the material aloud. This combination of article and episode is an experimental foray into unusual territory for each article/ excerpt posted each Monday or Tuesday and for each follow-up augmented audio version on RevolutionZ made live the following Sunday. The hope is to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke and contribute to discussions about vision and especially strategy for social change.]

First Gatherings and Rallies

Alexandra, you are a well known militant feminist who became politically engaged roughly in parallel with the emergence of RPS. You have been a workplace and union organizer and you are revered for your effective advocacy of non violent tactics and your outreach to people holding seriously contrary views. You have been centrally involved with RPS from its earliest days and you recently became its shadow Secretary of Labor. To start, I wonder if you would tell us how you first became radical?

Well, honestly Miguel, I didn’t have much choice. I was brought up in a family with radical parents who had been born into the Sixties scene and who became young members of the then SDS. They fought against the war in Indochina, and they fought for feminism. They were precocious activists and I guess they thought I should be precocious too. My mom became a community organizer who worked in the movements for the city and my dad was an auto worker and union activist with the UAW who became active in the Green social transformation of that industry. Because of them, by the time I entered high school, I already had radical insights and beliefs, but I didn’t quite have the drive that propels sustained commitment.

When Donald Trump was elected it was so utterly insane that it made me ill and, well, there was a bridge near where I was living and I thought about flying off. I thought a few seconds free flight would be better than decades suffering what such a lunatic could unleash. I was that sickened by Trump, as were my parents who wondered if he was the rotten fruit of their life’s work. Imagine my dad, eyes wide open, wondering how some of his auto worker friends could support such a barbaric character. My mom wondering, is this really what we are passing on to our daughter?

Trump’s vile presence also seriously upset my community of radically inclined friends but to my eyes too many seemed more intent on preserving some kind of personal radical stance than on collectively moving forward. Trump’s election was the first and last time I ever got fall down drunk and my dissolution lasted many weeks. Honestly, I felt the oceans would overflow. I felt the sky would burn. I felt beaten and washed up on a rotten shore. Friends had to rouse me from my bed-hugging depression.

Thankfully, an emerging resistance re-kindled my hope. I still wonder where other folks got the wherewithal to dissent even while I was still wallowing. Without the example of their resistance, I don’t know where the hell I would have wound up but certainly not talking with you here today. I knew that Trump was a product of our society and a gigantic aberration only in being as uncouth and extreme as he was. To me he seemed an insane genius at inducing insanity in others and he scared the shit out of me. My hatred for him gave me some anger driven passion, but alone, I doubt that would have kept me going.

So why did you become everlastingly radical? Why didn’t you pursue conventional success? Or, well, just wallow…

For one thing, I despised convention. Dinner parties, limos, money, and mansions repulsed me. Why seek that much less impoverished passivity? Love and dignity attracted me…but seemed out of reach…

I became a dissident journalist with similar feelings. But, there must have been some key events that attracted you. That prevented permanent wallowing. OR seeking only for self. Can you tell us what were some highpoint events of RPS, not for others, or for history, but for you?

It’s a hard question. Can we really describe our own turning points? I doubt it. I am not a very introspective person, but in hindsight I’d have to say the campaign for the 30 hour week that got visibly moving in 2026 and for worker participation in decision making that took off in 2027, and I would guess that the first two RPS Conventions probably had the most inspiring affect on who I politically became. They schooled me. But more personally, two influences were critical for me that may not be on the map of RPS history for anyone else. I had not long before been greatly inspired by the outpouring of student anger against the genocidal Israeli assault on Palestinians’ very existence. I didn’t feel anything but disdain for Hamas, but I felt intense pain for Palestinians. But I was astounded by the student support inside the U.S. for the Palestinians’ struggle, and I have to be honest, also by the simultaneous support of many for Israel which support terrified me for what it said about people’s capacities to lose track of reality and even their own values. Mostly though, I think the ability of those demonstrating to feel such empathy, such intensely emotional and caring militancy for Palestinians, kept me moving left. And then somewhat later came those two experiences I mentioned. 

The first was negative. It was a meeting that the then fledgling RPS had with workers in a defense plant that was associated with a campus where students were fighting against military ties and research. It was the early days of that struggle and I spoke in a large auditorium to protesting students but also to the plant’s defense-oriented employees. I was so nervous and angry that when I got up to speak I was literally trembling. I called for closing the workplace. I mean really, me, a hyped-up trembling kid. I hollered at everyone, “War kills! Weapons kill! Killing fucking kills! Shut it down!. Rise up and shut it down!”

I evidenced no concern for the workers’ future livelihoods because, honestly, I didn’t give that a thought. I had warfare on my mind. Here I was telling them to shut down their military work and yet even as I did so I ignored the situation of those dependent on the military’s contracts. A cocky kid, with none of their problems or insights, I railed at those workers as if they were war-mongering enemies of peace because they hadn’t rushed out to join student protests that would, as they were then formulated, have left them unemployed. One of the workers in the audience yelled back at me, “You want to steal my livelihood! You ignore my needs! What about my family? You should shut the fuck up!” I heard him, sort of, but I didn’t even pause.

But at least as I remember it, even as I was doing that, even caught up in the moment and offering the workers a suicidal notion of what solidarity with we students much less of what solidarity with those killed by their products required, I was oblivious. But when he yelled “Shut the fuck up” I felt ill at ease. Later I saw a video of what I had done and I was seriously distressed by it and violently angry at myself for having done it.

My talk there was the kind of thing radicals and revolutionaries often get caught up in. Our eyes would focus on being correct, on being holier than thou, on being revolutionary. We would watch those who agreed with us cheer us, but we would ignore the conditions and feelings of those we were supposedly trying to reach. This kind of activism repeatedly made working people so angry that they would completely dismiss our substance due to our apparent disdain for them. The employees justifiably hated me and I had much to learn.

It was damned hard to listen to people who had such contrary views. It was torture to hear their experiences. Might I get sucked into feeling like them? I don’t want that. So why listen? Why feel? But I tried, and in time I did both. They led and I learned. And of course movements against war-making learned that lesson as well.

Some didn’t learn that lesson so fast and so early. I didn’t, I admit. But now, perhaps your re-telling will help spread the awareness further. But you said a second event also particularly stirred you?

Who knows why we learn what we do, when we do? Perhaps I saw somewhere in my unconscious my parents frowning at my actions. Whatever, for the second personal event, I was at a memorial service held for civil rights activists from past years. It was part of countless events that had their origins in the historic Black Lives Matters actions of 2020 and again later. In any case, the music and solidarity combined to transport me until I had, I guess, a kind of psychotic break or something. I don’t know what it was, but I suddenly saw myself on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, where I had never been. I could see Bull Conner, who I had never seen, in action. I could see the activists who risked life and limb for change. I even saw my parents there though they were then too young to have been there.

Shook up by all that, I reread Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham Jail and his more famous Mountaintop speech. As a child my parents had read both to me. I liked it that they read stuff like that to me, especially I liked that they took me seriously, but beyond that it was no big deal. Ancient history. But then when I read it later, spurred on by my hallucinatory experience, I found the words incredibly inspiring. I even memorized them and later, when in jail or risking jail, or even choosing not to risk jail, I would repeat the speeches to myself, in my head, and when I had the chance, I would convey them to others. Even absent, MLK became a guide and mentor for me. I could hear him saying, “I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother’.”

His words made me think about how inaction was support for repression. It made me think of Howard Zinn, another favorite of my parents, who wrote “You Can’t be Neutral On a Moving Train.” It made me think of a campaign commercial for Bernie Sanders that I had seen. Sanders appeared in it and asked his viewers if they could fight as hard for others who they did not even know as they could fight for themselves. He said “if we can do that, we can win.” I was shocked to hear that sentiment from my TV. I remember crying a little. Sanders too opened me up.

What can you tell us about the first signs of RPS?

This is difficult because I would imagine some folks would trace aspects of RPS’s start back decades further, if not longer, to Alexandra Kollantai, for example, who i think my parents named me for, or perhaps to Mikhail Bakunin and so many others. But my impression was that significant numbers of people began to have what became RPS-type unity in mind roughly 20 years ago.

I remember my own first such feeling occurred at a rally in Detroit about raising the minimum wage and also curbing police violence. I went with my young daughter. It was a nice day, a calm crowd, and everyone enjoyed the camaraderie. That was typical of such events, nothing new in that, yet standing in the sun, listening, I felt that something exceeding the two stated priorities was happening. Something unusual, at least to my ears.

Various speakers explained how low minimum wages and recurring police violence were part of a larger encompassing dynamic of oppression and denigration. Speakers linked class, race, gender, and sexuality to the wage and the police violence issues emphasized that day and vice versa. “End police violence! Clean the damn water! Raise wages! Wage peace! Keep at it! Win the world!”

I had heard such linkages before, not least from my parents, but this time the speakers explicitly added that ultimately everything had to be renovated for anything to comprehensively and irredeemably change. They weren’t just talking about what’s right, but about what could work. A few speakers explicitly urged the need for mutual aid and organizational continuity among peoples’ many focuses. Some even offered ideas for what a movement of movements needed to structurally include to literally raise wages, reduce police violence, and especially win new social relations.

I had attended quite a few prior rallies and demonstrations but I had always felt that despite people’s passionate rhetoric, what they were doing was time-, issue-, and place-bound. I had heard powerful, uplifting, courageous, and inspiring rhetoric, but when sobriety returned, I had often regretfully felt that the rousing words lacked follow-up substance. It was a good show, but then what? Back home? Back to Netflix?

When Trump was elected, our activist priority, even while many of us were starting to ask for more, even while desires for more were growing, understandably became largely to stop him from bludgeoning us into the past. Thinking about that, I realized that for decades activism had typically emphasized ending ubiquitous ugliness and thwarting horrible intentions. But the rally in Detroit didn’t just say familiar things about what is wrong. It also said new things about what could be. And what can I say? I wanted in.

So I think those were my turning points toward what would become RPS. And even more than the ideas that circulated that day, I think what attracted me was a no surrender feeling in the air. It transcended verbal artistry and it certainly wasn’t macho posturing. It was calm. It was informed. It urged that we should have our eyes on winning fundamental gains in addition to preventing imminent losses. And people knew it would be a long struggle. Maybe my memory embroidered the event but I don’t think so. That rally helped attune me to winning beyond just surviving. It delivered something that I needed. But what about you Miguel? What got you into journalism and then also RPS?

I was in college, gleefully headed for a football/soccer future. I was good, actually very good, but the competitive, macho coaches and most players too drove me away from what I loved. Then the eye-opening revelations of those times, the pandemic and its grotesque priories, the demonstrating against police and then against racism writ large, the stark threat of genocide, and the readings that I followed all that up with, all together took me into activism and from there it was not a long leap to join RPS.

But, come on Alexandra. I am the interviewer, you are the interviewee. So while many pinpoint the 2028 march of a x million protestors on Wall Street as their RPS start. Not you? Were you there?

My personal turning point was that earlier, smaller Detroit rally, but yes, the later March on Wall Street had that same feeling. And it certainly inspired many more people than the earlier rally. And yes, I was there, and as nervous as I was, I was in the ridiculously long line of speakers, and I even gave my first speech to a big crowd. I remember it well. I said “We seek dignity and justice. We won’t settle for the periphery of power. We do not oppose impoverished budgets, escalating inequality, resurgent racism, sexual predation, assembly line schools, corporate profiteering, divisive classism, hideous repression, heinous war, OR planetary climate catastrophe. No, we oppose it all! We don’t demand racial solidarity, cultural integrity, gender equity, sexual diversity, political freedom, collective self-management, peace, ecological sanity, OR economic equity and classlessness. No, we demand it all! We don’t want old bosses, and we don’t want new ones either!”

And you are right, I remember at the Wall Street march feeling part of something much bigger that was just getting going. That march to the organizational center of economic depravity addressed income distribution and corporations but it also addressed abortion rights, racism and war, and the still strong and very seriously accelerating need for ecological sanity. That rally’s emergent, diverse community was starting to define itself. Connections were being made and spreading. It felt like I was inside a young but growing organism.

Why, what in particular made you feel that way?

All I can offer is that on the surface, the Wall Street march delivered focused dissent and excellent demands. But underneath that, the speakers, the arrangements, and the confidence made many of us feel we were collectively defining our connections to each other and our attitudes to society. There was good substance, as usual, but there was also good feeling. No wonder so many people were first inspired there.

My speech had more, and others like it occurred, more eloquent, but even those few words I said revealed how we were traveling toward the soon to be encompassing ethos of RPS. I felt the Wall Street March’s size and confidence. Being there gave me optimism, but if you had told me then that a decade and a half later I would be Secretary of Labor in a Shadow Government created by an organization that would help transform society forever, I would have laughed. Luckily, I would have been wrong.

Early Struggles

Andre Goldman, you are an economist and activist. You have been involved with RPS since its origin. You have held various movement jobs while writing a bunch of books and many many articles and teaching in various institutions. You have also continually helped to revise RPS program and vision. Do you remember your radicalization?

When I was in college I got into economics as a major. I am not sure why the hell that happened. I had been into math and science but I think I felt that I wasn’t quite smart enough for those pursuits and, as well, I wanted a more worldly involvement. But there was a fly in the ointment. My economics classmates eagerly did equations and recited pat answers about supply and demand. They argued about government spending and private investment. They solved this and that equation. Me, I just got bored. To my eyes, right or wrong, my mates were ignorant wannabe wonks who studied blindly with other wannabe wonks. Why the hell did they do that? Oh, in truth I actually tried to be like them. Why couldn’t I do what they did?

I took course after course until I could recite acceptable answers to sterile questions. But I had no idea what working in a corporation was like or even how a corporation functioned. To my thinking, it was as if a medical doctor knew a lot of biochemistry, or perhaps even more aptly, knew a whole bunch of irrelevant but complicated self help maxims, but didn’t know what lungs are, much less how to treat sick ones. Really, I felt it was about that bad. What economists thought and taught seemed to me to reflect their allegiances but not serious open-minded investigation of reality’s contours. They parroted predecessors. Critical thought, was on permanent sabbatical.

I was radicalized during my final college years by major campaigns against militarism, but before that, not long after arriving at school, I remember I went to a particular militant demonstration, mostly just curious, mostly just to spectate. But then to my surprise I agreed with what various speakers said, and I admired their willingness to take such a visible, public stand. The speakers’ passion was contagious but though I watched and I respected, I didn’t join. It was all quite new to me, and after I left, I wondered what it meant to watch something, admire it, respect it, feel happy it was happening, and yet not join in more fully.

That was me, then, and I didn’t instantly suddenly become a card carrying leftie. But I did feel embarrassed that I had stood silent even as I admired what I saw. I did feel I had avoided responsibility. I even felt some shame about it, I guess, and it gnawed at me. But still I hesitated to become active. I think at some level I felt if I got really political, if I pointed out injustices, I would get in arguments and even fights. I would annoy others. I would lose friends. I didn’t want that.

But you finally did all that, so what happened?

Maybe I finally realized that having new friends based on me being true to myself mattered more than losing some prior friends due to disagreeing with them about seeking change. Or maybe I just drifted into it. I don’t know but in any event, whatever got me past my resistance to being political, before long the 2027 Schools for the People campaign roused me and then the 2028 Olympia Refinery takeover made the prospect of actually winning fundamental change real for me. I guess that’s what really made me revolutionary.

Do you remember those?

Yes, should I set the scene?

Of course, go ahead.

At the Olympia refinery plant, occupiers blocked access. Supporters rallied just beyond. A fancily dressed elderly owner glared down. Drones flew over. I can still remember the owner scream at us, “My workers. My company. My machines. My product. You earn what I pay you. You produce what I tell you. That’s how it is. I boss. You obey. Now move your lazy asses out of my way.”

One of the strikers replied, “No. We work for our families, for our community, for ourselves, not for you. We will get worthy pay, respect, and a say. And we will get ecological sanity as well. That’s how it will be.” And then another striker said, “We will not violate nature any longer. We will not move. Not you, not your scabs, nor anyone else will refine oil here ever again! Your drones don’t intimidate us. Your commands won’t move us. Your wealth doesn’t scare us. Your time is over. It is you who will move. No more bossing. No more rising oceans and howling hurricanes. No more you. Henceforth we are converting this workplace to produce Solar Panels. Stay on and work for a participatory workplace with us, or get…the…hell…out! The future will be what we make it, not what you dictate.”

How could I not be profoundly moved hearing that? Those workers knew so much that my economics teachers didn’t have an inkling about. And they knew it more deeply. It was real for them. They were real. So that was a pivotal event for me.

Ultimately, I decided that when I thought something was right, and if I believed that I could further it, then I should do so. I think that inclination likely had a big impact on my joining the various boycott efforts.

What also comes to mind was that when I graduated, with the boycott campaigns raging fiercely, I finally visited some workplaces to test whether my economics training was as bereft of wisdom as I thought. That was another irreversible turning point because I realized my training was worse even than I had thought. I watched people doing various rote jobs. Then I listened to them tell me what the jobs did to them. This was news to me. But how could it be news? Wasn’t it at the core of economics? Wasn’t it utterly obvious that work not only affects products but also effects those who do it so any theory of work should include great attention to its effects on workers? Assembly line work produces cars but also exhausted and beaten down workers. I saw what other jobs, like being a manager did to other people. This was real economics, not fictitious stories or sterile equations, and the jolting palpable experience of it intensified my radicalization.

I reported on the events in Olympia. I watched the workers redefine their lives in awe at their wisdom and courage and it so inspired me that I joined RPS. I was a journalist already but because of them I was no longer a bystander. What was your path to joining? Can you tell us what events in RPS history most affected you personally?

I don’t think I can rank them, but I was incredibly inspired by the Public Schools for the People campaign and a little later by the Amazon sit down strike and the support it garnered and spinoffs it inspired. In each case I got to see the action and feel the spirit. The joy and courage of the people involved were incredibly infectious.

I mean, really. Envision it. I am in a high school auditorium. Parents, community people, and teachers are at a meeting that the parents demanded. The principal says “what do you want from us? We teach your children. We house them. I am a good principal. Damnit. Let me educate your kids. For Christ’s sake be grateful. Our school is what it is. Where’s your gratitude? Go home.”

Envision parent after parent rising to speak, often haltingly, always emotively. “I graduated eighth grade,” reported one. “No high school, nothing more for me. Can you understand that life out in the world is all too lonely. Community out there is too often little more than looking for mall sales and avoiding scams and greed. So, yes, I would like to have a center here in my children’s school where I could learn and socialize at night.” Another rose and said,  “I heard something once. ‘I want roses on my table, not diamonds on my neck.’ I like that. Fuck the diamonds. I want to talk to someone who wants to talk to me. That’s the roses. So why are schools empty at night? And why are they like factories or prisons by day”?

Still another parent stood and said, “We want education not warehousing. We want a community center where we can all learn. For Christ’s sake, indeed. You wake the hell up!” And then another parent said, “Teachers want better wages. And they are right. And we want better access. And we are right. Can you even hear us? Do you even try to hear us? We want a second home, right here, in this building. Our school isn’t what it could be. It isn’t what it could be. We are going to make it over. We are going to make it ours.” I had tears in my eyes as the audience erupted in militant glee. The phrase “it isn’t what it could be” reverberated in me.

I heard that and more like that and I thought, no shit, these folks know. They know. They experience. They live what phony economics denies. Not only should public schools really benefit kids and their parents too, but so should colleges teach truths.

And then regarding the Amazon strike, while I wasn’t an employee I did line up outside in support. The courage those workers showed was remarkable. To sit down and tell the owners, police, and the state that they simply would not be moved short of their winning dignity and income was phenomenal. How could I order from Amazon and ignore that? On the other hand, how could I not order from Amazon? Some big changes were clearly needed, really big ones, and deep down everyone knew it. I remember there was this constant effort to break the workers’ spirit. One of the techniques was a steady flow of rumors about gangs coming to attack them, but non stop outside support put the lie to that.

I saw that all the people involved were not following. They were leading. They were all together the source of energy. All together they set the tone. The strike was their’s to its core. The participants were militant, but also compassionate. Years earlier big strikes had had lots of Trumpist participants. No more. These Amazon workers danced and fought. They weren’t RPS yet, but not many harbored illusions to rationalize fascist behavior. Both these experiences were exemplary for all who participated or who even just heard about them, and for whatever reasons each of these experiences, one in communities, one in workplaces, touched me, and not only me, particularly deeply.

It wasn’t long after that when inspiring events and campaigns arrived almost daily. Each one moved me further than the last because each always built on what had gone before and foreshadowed what was still to come. Yet something about those two early experiences stuck with me always, so even now, when you ask, I answer with them.

Returning to the origins of RPS, what role did the early boycotts play?

The Wall Street march unleashed incredible energy and desire. It showed that a large sector of the population rejected the deadening past and wanted to contribute to an enlivening future. That was the tone. Give me dignity, dammit. And that tone mattered, as did the more immediate demands, of course.

I was in college, living near Boston studying economics, which was still, back then—you can see this is a refrain for me—a thankless socially sterile and elite-serving pursuit. Suddenly student activism demanded an end to campus complicity in war. And the boycott that inspired that campus development came from the Wall Street march that in turn had built on the earlier opposition to funding and providing weapons for Israeli/American genocidal war on Gaza.

One of the Wall Street speeches called for all those present, and all their family, and all their friends, and all who they could reach out to, to stop buying products from producers of the automatic high velocity weapons that were prevalent in public mass shootings. And the idea took off across society and sparked a remarkable broadening of activism by attracting new recruits. I think it wasn’t just that it was needed. It was that people saw how their actions could help, they felt it was winnable.

But I didn’t own a gun and I was never going to buy one. It would waste time pushing an open door for organizers to talk to me or to anyone I was in school with about boycotting those weapons. We weren’t gun aficionados. People who wanted to work on the gun boycott had to talk instead to people who owned or who might soon decide to own a product from the gun manufacturers. Indeed, it was a wonderful benefit of the campaign that to succeed it had to explicitly reach out to audiences that many activists had until then fearfully, or perhaps arrogantly, but certainly ignorantly and counterproductively avoided. Some people had reached out to that audience years earlier when Trump ran against Clinton, and then against Biden, and then again, but the boycott was different because the boycott organizers had to bring to gun owners precisely the message the gun owners were most hostile too. Nonetheless, activists started learning how to do that and then learning about and from those they talked with. And in hindsight this was, I believe, a major turning point for the emergence of RPS.

How? In what sense was it such a turning point?

Left activists have always sought gains for their own immediate supporters but unlike many other projects and movements, pretty much from jump, RPS allotted its most creative and its greatest energies to reaching out to those who very strongly disagreed with us. That started in the early boycotts, and I guess even earlier in some work that battled Trumpist fascism.

At any rate, campus boycott activism arose first at MIT where a bunch of students, including myself, went to Wall Street and were inspired by the famous “We Are the Future” speech. We heard the call for a boycott of arms dealers and we started talking about how we might relate to it. It was an action idea and we wanted action. We could certainly organize for students to not buy from the producers of automatic weapons, but we felt doing so would be sort of silly. MIT students were not prospective customers of those producers. It would be like organizing fish not to fly. It was not needed, so it would not be useful.

So the talking went on and a new idea surfaced. Why should we confine ourselves to manufacturers of the hand held weapons that enable lone psychopaths to become mass murderers? Why not also take on the stupendously larger military-producers who engendered death, destruction, and misallocation of resources? After all, their weapons let countries, including particularly our own, wage genocidal massacres.

We quickly realized that such a boycott couldn’t be by individual students since individual students didn’t buy or design tanks or missile systems in their homes—but it could be by MIT as an institution. We would have to create a campus movement to demand that MIT reject contracts with arms producers and war purveyors. We would have to organize students not just to boycott assault rifles, which they would do anyhow, but to resist the militarization of local and campus police and even larger, to resist all campus complicity with war.

I think the boycott approach was part and parcel of the thinking of the boycotts that sought to generate solidarity with Palestinians, and similarly I  think the anti war boycott extended the recent resistance toward Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians. It of course also stretched back to the earlier boycott around South African Apartheid. In any event, we said that MIT should not seek profits for investors but instead pursue peace and justice for humanity. And since the time was right, when we reached out to students asking for agreement that complicity in war was wrong, it was like selling ice cream in the tropics.

Come on. It can’t have been that easy, there must have been obstacles, no?

Yes, okay, sure there were. I was too glib, overly liking my analogy. For example, we encountered a troubling response that for MIT to end war research overnight would be budgetary suicide. We decided to deliver our demand and organize support, but to do so in ways that would ensure that the demand was implementable so we also offered positive ideas for a financial transition to take the suicide aspect off the table. No more war research would be our primary demand but we would also propose how to operate viably without war research.

We revealed in considerable detail how campus spending could prioritize dealing with on-going existentially threatening global warming and other ecological and infrastructural issues. We highlighted how funds could come from revised government budgets and also from punitive taxes on corporate arms producers. We initiated campus-wide sustained discussion of all these matters. We went dorm to dorm, over and over, and in time demanded a campus referendum. The demands weren’t even really radical. They were common sense. So was our threat. Meet our demands or we will shut this place down.

Having emerged from reflexive opposition to Trump, but then from thoughtful, angry but also strategic support for Palestine, we didn’t let our anger crowd out the need for clear communication. We thought carefully about the consequences of our efforts for ourselves, for the student body as a whole, for others beyond campus, and for society and we tried to mold our demands and associated actions to ensure desirable lasting effects. For the administration, we had immediate demands. But for ourselves and more broadly for whoever we encountered or impacted, we kept in mind the need to get desirable lasting effects.

I remember long personal sessions with friends to explore how to discuss demands with students and faculty who were for whatever reasons not yet on our side, and also what actions we could use not just to express our anger, but to win reasoned, committed support able to apply still more pressure to go further.

Our approach was less quick, emotive, and feisty than had we rushed into high gear and never down-shifted to evaluate what we were doing, but we believed a more careful approach had more chance of long term success. The administration found it hard to oppose our calls for greater attention to global warming, for research on new energy sources, and for various ecologically sensible campaigns. What were they going to say. “MIT loves global warming. We love oil. We don’t give a shit about the health of anything except bottom line corporate profits.” They found it hard to refute our well researched and carefully formulated rejection of weapons research, and even our public events, talks, and then actions.

What was your own experience of it?

The boycott was my first serious political activism and luckily the effort took off. I remember pretty early on watching an activist accost an administrator: “How can you sensibly oppose our calls for greater attention to global warming? Do you want to fry us all? How can you reject focusing research on new energy sources and needed health campaigns? Do you want tsunamis, hurricanes, pestilence, and disease? How can you sensibly refute our rejection of weapons research? Do you want relentless fear and murder?” I almost felt sorry for the administrator. But the activist was sincere, she wanted answers from the administrator—really, how could you?—even though she was mostly talking to students within range to hear.

Once I got the courage and confidence to get involved, I organized rallies, and did a lot on social media, and also helped arrange face to face meetings for free-ranging open-ended discussions in living units. I worked on teach-ins and helped organize campus marches and finally when our support grew wide enough, I helped organize and then helped occupy offices and labs. Honestly, the work was relatively easy because I became active at an opportune moment. The earlier very widespread opposition to providing weapons for Israel’s horrendous war on Palestine had set the stage.

You say you got involved when you got the courage and confidence. Well, how did you get that?

I don’t really know. At first the courage to stand, to risk repression, or even just public criticism was foreign to me. To watch it in action mystified me. The confidence to speak, to act, and not feel like a phony fool doing so, I didn’t have that. I don’t know the mix that birthed it. I do know without it, nothing much happens.

Were there more factors in your choices at the time?

I, we, had also heard about earlier efforts at MIT in the late 1960s, and we looked into that. After all, the Sixties was big and raucous but they, and they were we just writ earlier, did not fully win, and we wanted to do better. The Sixties didn’t change society into a fundamentally new shape, or even prevent, decades later, Trumpism from arising. I admit that I wondered if our efforts would also grow greatly at first only to later dissipate. A decade, two decades on, much less a half century on, what would remain?

So one of our priorities became trying to discern past problems that we could avoid so we could do better. This was another key mindset leading toward RPS. We knew good activism had to calmly find its own internal problems. We had to find the older problems and more recent ones too, so we could do better.

So, okay, how were your efforts different than earlier ones?

There were unique and difficult periods for the boycott, but the campaign grew and soon there was a national boycott of manufacturers selling assault rifles to the public but also a campus boycott that spread from MIT to Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Michigan State as the first few military connected schools to adopt the campaign, and that then spread far more widely. That was already quite different than anything earlier. We were damn angry and seriously intent, just like our Sixties predecessors had been. But we were more careful. Our most energetic activists didn’t run out ahead of everyone else, but instead constantly related to everyone else and brought as many people further along as possible. We also consciously reached out, on campus, for example, to athletes and fraternity members, and beyond campus from MIT to other schools, sharing lessons. I don’t know quite how to express it. The immediate scale and militance and smarts of an action weren’t our main criteria of judgement. Instead it was the ability of an action to bring in new supporters, to strengthen our own resolve, and to make our movement more mutually supportive with others that mattered most to us. But I don’t want to give a wrong impression. We wanted to win, desperately, just like our Sixties forebears, but we had a longer timeline and we better understood, I think, that to win we needed to reach way beyond immediate audiences, way beyond ourselves. If some of us wild in the streets would do all that, great. But if it wouldn’t, then later for wild in the streets.

Sometimes a school had fewer Pentagon ties and dependencies, so the battle was somewhat easier, but the overall campaign just kept spreading and growing. It became a harbinger of things to come when to support the boycott became a mark of student responsibility. That was the kind of thing we sought. We got it to the point where to be responsible, to be mature, to be learning began to require that you join the movement. To oppose it became retrograde. We didn’t shame people for not joining, rather the movement uplifted people when they did join. This was another difference, I think. Yes, we were against militarism and its weapons, of course, but more so, we were for peace and justice, including better lives for ourselves and everyone.

Another aspect was student workers on campus, and other workers, coming aboard and in some cases, leading the way. They and we too brought another dimension. Let’s not just end the current war-producing, war-abetting policies, lets end policy-making by only administrators and even corporate boards. Let’s get some democracy, and then some more.

It was particularly inspiring and foretelling when cross campus solidarity led to city wide demonstrations and rallies, and when movements on different campuses started sharing lessons and explicitly lending each other serious support. It was eye-opening when after three years of efforts, and this is after I was no longer even a student, we held a rally culminating in a sit-in at MIT that had over 50,000 students and supporters from all over the Boston area. Nothing quite like that had been done decades earlier. That was fighting to win. It was fighting for more even than our immediate aims. Then when all those and more attended a rally and subsequent sit in a few weeks later at Harvard, we realized we were not going to be stopped. People weren’t jumping ship. People were staying aboard. Our upward trajectory of growing sustained support was too much to overcome. We had a long ways to go, of course, but we realized we couldn’t be thwarted unless we undermined ourselves and we were steadfastly committed to carefully avoiding that. And you know, the spreading didn’t happen by magic. Organizers went to visit less involved schools and helped them get more involved.

Can you tell us about some of the “unique and difficult moments”?

Sure, I remember like it was yesterday. One hard step we had to accomplish was to discover and reveal the war-related research. How could we do that? Students had tough class schedules and few resources. The contracts were secret. Each project was isolated from the rest and even more, each was shielded from not only the public but students too.

In that context, a few daring students snuck into a secret site, took pictures, and stole revealing documents. Sometimes radical activism is very boring. Other times, like then, it is quite exciting. But this particular choice wasn’t just exciting. It proved beyond doubt that MIT wasn’t solely engaged in respectable science that the military could not pervert. Rather, MIT was a big corporation literally designing drones, robots, surveillance, weapons, and bomb and missile technology for repressing domestic and foreign populations. Students elsewhere made aware of such efforts quickly used similar tactics to often even more successfully uncover their own campus’s projects. Once we had evidence, we called for open books and escalated our calls for war divestment.

Do you know Walt Whitman’s poem that references seeing the universe in a grain of sand? I heard something like that from a famous scientist who said that nature uses only the longest threads so that each small piece reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. We started to realize that each radical campaign teaches a remarkable amount relevant to all radical campaigns. That was certainly true for opposing war, weapons, and militarism. I hope my story can convey some of that.

I am sure it will, but do you remember how MIT tried to stop the movement?

Sure, I remember the incredibly hypocritical lengths to which MIT’s typically liberal campus officials stretched their minds to come up with rationales for conspiring in murderous policies. And much of the faculty too. Knowledgeable, scientifically-oriented, highly logical, and in many cases even socially concerned adults swiftly swept aside evidence so they could trumpet self-serving rationales. They admired themselves in the mirror, oblivious to their murderous culpability. Watching that we learned a lot about what really marks a civilized, thinking, caring person. Rhetoric and a bunch of diplomas were insufficient. They were often even a powerful obstacle.

Society has a kind of Catch-22. You can access resources, accumulated lessons, and so on, but you have to become oppression-ignoring, self-serving, system-saluting, crime-abetting cheerleaders for whatever society’s masters unleash. That’s harsh, and there were exceptions, of course, but all too often it was true. Access to well stocked libraries and labs, not to mention elite country clubs could be yours so long as you molded yourself into a system-elevating tool who wouldn’t use the library or lab for anything subversive. 

Beyond even that, which was more than bad enough, a few right wing officials happily celebrated what they were doing rather than feeling a need to rationalize it. And I can’t deny, at the opposite extreme, a few caring officials and quite a few faculty, along with many many students did escape the bounds of their roles to ally with us, and more so as each day passed. Still, before our movements were strong enough to protect dissenters, the not just caring but also courageously active few typically got ostracized and then sometimes expelled or fired for their wisdom.

I remember that the staunch right winger’s absence of hypocrisy made them in some ways easier to personally tolerate than the more prevalent liberals who deluded themselves and tried to delude us. I had heard that black organizers during the anti Jim Crow campaigns decades earlier in the U.S. South said the same thing about talking personally with overtly racist police chiefs as compared to talking personally with liberals who would say one thing and then do precisely the opposite. At least with the right wingers, what you got was what they said, albeit what they said was vile. I also remember being very impressed with the officials who sincerely resisted their higher ups, which was initially barely a trickle, but which eventually grew to at least feel like much more.

Of course we students faced opposition, denigration, penalties, and overt repression during the boycott campaigns and later just as we had somewhat earlier for being pro Palestinian and anti Zionist. But that went with the territory. A more interesting trend was administrators trying to use fear and our sense of responsibility to curb us. They would spread rumors about how right wing students were getting ready to assault us and how the administrators sympathized with us but wanted to avoid that horror, so wouldn’t we please discontinue our encampment or our occupation of some lab to avoid disastrous student against student violence. The warnings were cynical lies. Their threats to use police, however, were real. And the pattern was similar on campus after campus.

What were some key lessons of the boycotts regarding organizing?

I think perhaps most subtle but also maybe most important was that organizers being right wasn’t enough. We had to also speak, write, and act in ways that people could and would actually hear and consider. Activist communication was about information, of course, but it needed to also be about feelings, empathy, and respect. Logic and evidence but also dignity mattered. Shouting the truth that no one would register because of our robotic or dismissive attitude did no good.

Another key lesson addressed repression. You couldn’t ward it off by saying, “hey, that’s not right, that’s immoral, cut it out.” Telling a hurricane to stop blowing was a fool’s errand. The way to ward off repression was to organize in such a way that to repress you would actually strengthen you. The administration had to feel that if they used cops much less national guard against us, sympathy for us would wind up helping us more than their batons hurt us. It is a trivially simple insight, I think, and almost universally applicable, but too often not accounted for and never very easy to act on.

Another subtle and interesting lesson, I think, and I suspect this may be partly enriched by hindsight, was about the mindsets of the students we asked to join the effort. Discussions would often go on for hours with students critical of or at least not joining the boycott efforts. They would offer first one rationale for not joining the campaign and then another. The weapons aren’t really offensive, they would say. Or they won’t be used. Or they are needed to preserve peace. Or, perhaps most strange, when used they will provoke dissent and thereby limit their own impact.

I remember my initial way to reply: “Not for offense? Preserve peace? Are you blind or just heartless?” Sadly, When I first heard students rationales, I would get aggressive and communication would stop. Later I became more patient. We would get beyond rhetoric to try to overcome rationales with evidence about how weapons are actually used and about the piles of corpses they produce, plus appeals to common sense values, plus noting that fighting against weapons that were being used was a horrible step back from fighting against weapons even existing—and in doing all that we got steadily closer to the heart of the matter with each student we talked with.

And when we finally got down to the roots of their reactions, from campaign to campaign, in one dorm and then in the next, on one campus and then on the next, students who resisted boycott appeals would finally tell organizers, “okay, okay, you are right about the facts. You are right about the ethics. But I am still not joining. Being right in a lost cause will achieve nothing.”

I heard that sentiment, it seemed like a million times, and they did sincerely feel it. Over and over, if you plumbed the depths of non participation you ultimately got to, “you are right, but you will fail, so it isn’t worth my time.”

It was very enlightening to hear that being right wasn’t enough to win people to the cause. We also had to have a good chance to succeed, and those who rejected our boycott thought we had no such chance.

How did you deal with that?

In reply, we would patiently explain how signing up enough sufficiently informed and committed support could win. Eventually folks who resisted our call would admit that campus administrations would give in if a large enough percentage of students and faculty were unrelentingly committed to boycotting. They saw that it would make no sense for campuses to try to preserve war research for budgetary reasons or even for “patriotism” reasons when doing so would mean an end to their institutions due to rebellion by their students and faculty.

But then there would surface the full scope of what for me was the most important and revealing reason for people’s resistance to heeding our call. “I am still not going to join you,” they would finally say, “because it is useless on a larger scale. It doesn’t matter if you win here or not. Even if you convince enough people like me, and we together get rid of war research here, it will be done somewhere else. Even if you have lots and lots of people in many places, it will still come back somewhere and eventually everywhere. We have to play along and get what little we can. I will not be Don Quixote pushing for peace against intractable war just to feel moral. People are greedy. People are violent and evil. There is no stopping war. There is no stopping injustice and inequality. Winning matters, and you can’t win. You are on a fool’s errand.”

Looking back, it seems so sad, as if the young folks were jaded and beaten old folks—morbidly old before their time, morbidly old while still in fucking college…

Yes, that kind of hopeless morbidity significantly fueled almost all the student resistance we encountered. It was stated explicitly only after overcoming other rationales because students didn’t like to admit such defeatism but they definitely deeply felt it. And so when all else had been rebutted, students would say, “human nature sucks so we are all fucked. You should make the best of it while you can. Play along. Your efforts to save much less to change society are futile.”

I must admit, I remember initially being radical to like myself, to be liked by my friends, but not to win. It wasn’t that I overtly expected losing so much as I never seriously entertained winning and what was required to do it. Doubt about winning didn’t only restrain conservatives, or old people. Doubt was a hard nut to crack.

That’s exactly right. While we relatively easily addressed morals, the harder obstacle was cynicism. Sometimes college felt like a cynic’s playground, or perhaps more accurately, like a factory producing cynics. College often seemed like an old folks home. Doubt was everywhere. It became clear that we had to develop vision and strategy sufficient to overcome the belief that nothing better was possible.

I spent time looking back at the Sixties and discovered our situation was nothing new. The Hippie cultural movement decades earlier provided a receptive place to seek recruits because they were already outside the mainstream and that was a major help back then, but it wasn’t enough. Deep-rooted despair was an obstacle to outreach back then too. We had to do better.

I began to believe that overcoming cynicism was the single greatest indicator of people in some situation becoming radical and of a movement steadily advancing. Of course, people’s cynicism was often bolstered by how much they thought they had to lose, but cynicism was pivotal even for those who had nothing to lose.

Where did such cynicism come from?

A defeatist attitude was drummed in tenaciously during upbringing and then schooling and thereafter by society’s roles which made social defeatism and individualist greed a rational near-term response to society’s inequalities and hierarchies. Being cynical about winning social justice pushed students to seek only personal success, especially for those who thought they were going to be really well off and have benefits that they didn’t want to risk. But it also colonized people destined for low income, low status, and debilitating circumstances. Cynicism is a sick society’s oppressive glue. Dystopia displaces utopia. Finding fault and broadcasting and dramatizing depravity was culturally dominant. To be deemed mature, one had to harbor hopelessness.

From our campus experiences, I soon realized that in communities and workplaces and wherever else, this defeatism was a critical factor in why people resisted fighting for change. People had a gut level belief, sometimes even unconscious, that nothing better was possible. People thought, or at least felt, or at least made themselves feel that we have had social evil for so long and it is so ingrained that we can’t overcome it. They felt, “It is so fucking obvious, how could activists not see it. Only fools try for change.” Or they instead thought “social evil is literally part of our nature. Nothing non evil can persist long because our natures will subvert it.”

Pessimists would spin whatever facts came their way to always indicate how difficult change would be. They explained everything in the most depression-inducing and hopelessness-creating ways. Once you became aware of what was occurring, you could see it everywhere. That’s why to dissent implied that you were immature, thoughtless, and naive. It was a giant gain when we made it that to dissent implied that you are cool, reasoned, caring, courageous, and even wise.

How?

The mass upsurges to defeat Trumpism, necessary and positive as they were, didn’t fundamentally combat this abiding cynicism about fundamental change remotely as much as needed. Anti-Trump activism was too much about removing what was deemed a monumentally awful aberration in order to get back to admittedly depressing business as usual for it to directly challenge the deeper cynicism that said depressing business is the only possible kind of business.

And that is what seemed true for Sixties radicalism and for much else that came before RPS. There was often great, courageous, and temporarily inspiring motion. Moments of elation and moments of hope and fierce struggle. And such moments were a kind of tear-in-the-tide of hopelessness. But social glue to hold such energy, spirit, and confidence together was largely absent. Over and over, moments of upsurge didn’t persist. The rip they tore was too partial to last. It repeatedly mended itself. For those most aroused, activism was typically due to belief in small gains against horrible deviant horrors, but it was not belief in huge gains against the whole current social order. You would have your group, team, whatever, but the idea of mass action seemed foreign. You might even win something, but to seriously seek to win everything not over night but over the long haul was considered delusional.

Many activists came to understand that we had to go beyond warding off excessive reactionary evil. Many came to understand that we had to create hope about a new society, not just about ending one war, stopping global warming, or blocking a race toward rejuvenated racism. But it took time for this lesson to move from being an idea that some would offer to nearly deaf ears, to actually defining what people chose to do, though I deeply believe that that occurring was key to RPS emerging and growing. And how did it happen? What effectively combated cynicism? I think it was having and being able to convey compelling vision, but also activists honestly coming across as, mature, caring, informed, thoughtful, and hopeful and thereby undoing the idea that to be any of that, you had to have little or no hope.

Were there other lessons, specifically from the militarism boycott?

There was a more subtle one that was for me comparably important. We fought to get our universities to stop supporting military agendas. That was good. It looked forward rather than just rejecting going backward. That too was good. But it had a problem.

What would winning achieve? Would our victory mean the murderous research that universities had been doing would no longer occur? No, it would not. As some who resisted our appeals realized before we did, we too came to understand that the research would migrate to private firms often even created by university personnel as schools would spin off labs by making them into private corporate firms, maybe even still operating in the same buildings they once occupied, but now jettisoned by the earlier sponsoring school. This would not only maintain war production, but also retain the previously involved faculty. Only the names of buildings and legal definition of firms would change, not to protect innocence, but to hide persistent guilt.

This trend was rightly scorned as a massive version of not in my backyard you can’t put that crap—but, okay, you can put it somewhere else. You can even keep it in the same damn buildings it has till now occupied as long as you legally disown it even while it keeps right on operating as in the past. Better optics. Same inhumanity.

The lesson that I and others took was that we shouldn’t allow partial gains to deteriorate or be reversed by cosmetic realignments. Campus movements had to transcend campuses to take on private corporations as well. Today MIT, Stanford, and the University of Michigan. Tomorrow, not only the spinoffs, but also the NSA, Raytheon, and Boeing.

Instead of all the experience we gained on campuses merely moving the site of crimes and then we go home, we expanded our focus.

I was out of school by this point and many of us began reaching out to workers at companies doing war research. But by that time, instead of trying to get the people and firms to stop cold and therefore go out of business and put the workers out of jobs, our proliferating and diversifying anti-war movement confronted all sorts of firms with demands for how they could do new, socially desirable work in place of war work, thereby retaining their employees even as we simultaneously confronted the government with demands to re-allot funds from military to social use.

I remember, in particular, one of the demonstrations where we activists blocked the entrance to a weapons firm and conversed with workers there. It was a tense scene, with constant threats including helicopters circling above. This firm was deemed part of the military, so in that sense we were attacking the army. At any rate, we said we want war firms like yours to work against global warming and for equity. We want Congress to reassign funds from building bombers, missiles, and tanks, to producing green transit, schools, clinics, and solar plants.

A worker replied, “Yes, and after you put us out of work, how do I feed my kids? Answer me that!”

We answered something like this: “After global warming floods the world how do you lead your lives? Answer me that. But why should you lose your job? Why shouldn’t your workplace employ you in worthy production? You might think the rich opt for war production instead of social production for technical or military reasons. But that is a lie. The rich opt for war production to ward off enlarged social spending because social spending reveals that the government ought to benefit the whole population. They block enlarged social spending because it would empower workers against threats of firing. Hatred for social spending that empowers working people biases the budget.”

Another worker then said, “You expect me to believe war spending trumps social spending because building hi-tech weapons avoids empowering workers?”

“Exactly. You could have a more meaningful job, better conditions, and more income too, and so could all workers, with much less war production. But while you would gain, owners would lose, and that’s why they prefer building missiles and bombs to ending global warming and building hospitals and schools. It isn’t that they love mayhem and murder. They are not that perverse. It is that they fear empowered workers. They are that scared.” The worker responded, after a bit, “Perhaps…but owners are in charge…” And I said, “Yes, for now, yes they are, but not forever.”

And that showed another lesson we learned. We started to ask, why the hell would a society militantly pursue militarist production over humanist production? The answer had to be that for decision-makers to ward off rejection of the military path was to ward off a threat. But we knew the threat wasn’t some external enemy. That was nonsense. The threat had to be that to produce housing and schools and to otherwise redistribute wealth from the military and private arms producers to uses that would benefit the population was way worse than producing weapons that benefitted no one other than those who directly profited off their production.

We knew that the people deciding, albeit with some exceptions, were not literally sadistic. They didn’t build a tank and not a school, because they literally wanted to rob, much less kill students. And we knew that benefits of military production other than profits for directly involved corporations were slim and even non existent. We even knew that a shift in focus of war-related firms to social production could preserve and indeed enlarge their workforces and in the short run probably even their profits. The government could pay for a transit system instead of a missile system. Private firms could receive the government payments in either case. We ultimately realized as well that when the government acted on behalf of the population it could have two effects which the government and elites felt they desperately needed to avoid.

First, enlarged social spending could reduce conditions of instability and poverty and, in so doing, could empower workers and insure them against attacks from employers, thereby increasing their ability to win still greater gains. And second, social spending could establish what elites considered a terrible notion—that the government ought to benefit the whole population.

I remember how seeing these two points made the disgusting logic of capitalist social structure far more real to me. It wasn’t just that the government liked war and wanted its tools or even just felt it had to have its tools. It was that to produce socially valuable output would empower its recipients and establish the idea that government should serve and benefit those in need, not those wedded to greed.

I wonder if you took any lessons that were more personal?

There was a key lesson for me bearing on organizing and people’s belief systems. I was in Texas on a trip and I spoke about the boycott of military work in a big meeting and there were lots of questions about private guns. I remember after the talk, I got into it with a campus advocate of open carry who wanted students to be free to bring hand guns to classes. We were arguing on a lawn and before long there were a bunch of people, maybe twenty or thirty, listening and tossing in comments.

What struck me after awhile was how we were arguing right past each other. The gun advocate was taking for granted permanently abysmal societal conditions. He felt that at any moment some demented soul could try to impose his will on you. Some maniac could pull out a gun of his own and start shooting people. Having this view, the gun advocate felt there was only one antidote. He had to have his own gun for self defense.

For him the issue of guns or no guns was like a miniature version of  the old notion of mutually assured destruction in which gargantuan stores of nuclear weaponry on both sides meant neither Russia nor the U.S. could use what they had without being annihilated. Similarly, my gun advocating adversary believed that if most or even all students were carrying hand guns, no student could get away with being a bully or imposing his will. Even a crazy student hell bent on murder wouldn’t be able to do much before succumbing. Forget that this ignored the abundant presence of guns unleashing crazy inclinations and escalating what would otherwise be moderate disputes into violence not to mention creating a debilitating climate of fear. The gun advocate took all that as baseline. In his view, that was in any event unavoidable.

I listened and realized gun advocates believed society was headed to hell in a turbo charged hand cart and that no significant renovation was possible. This wasn’t academic for them. It wasn’t merely a possibility. They thought it couldn’t be averted and reversed. It was inevitable. So arose gun advocates’ mutual assured destruction logic. When I wore their shoes, and “saw” what they “saw,” I could suddenly understand how they could feel the way they felt.

For me, open carry would unleash hysterical fear and escalate moderate disputes into violent catastrophes. Draw or be drawn on. More arms mean more flash points of mayhem at home and abroad. Arms fed a military mindset that infected all policy. But for the gun advocate it was different. Guns offset guns. They would say to me, “you are so damn naive. So damn ignorant. So damn stupid. Escalations happen. They are what they are. Killing killers here and abroad is the only solution. Innocent blood will scar your hands.” NRA profiteers drove gun policy, of course, but I came to realize that many grassroots gun and war advocates just felt social corruption was irreversible. They felt violence was unavoidable. The only defense they saw was a gun of one’s own. To make headway against that we had to establish that society did not have to be a shooting gallery.

This gave me a new view of many other difficult debates as well. we weren’t going to win what seemed like even trivially simple and limited issues such as that kids carrying guns in classes would be horrible for everyone, unless we first won a non trivial, not at all simple issue—that society did not have to keep devolving into a kill or be killed condition.

The general lesson was that in horrible circumstances that people believe will only get worse, things that are insane when considered in light of positive social aims can seem perfectly sensible and even necessary for self defense. If you believe inevitable dynamics rule out social sanity, then why not opt for the most effective “insane approach” you can find? In many cases, the fact that people took that path did not make them irrational, or even proponents of evil. Their approach made a kind of sense, given their incorrect but understandable assumptions. Learning this stood me in good stead for later trying to communicate across gigantic chasms of difference. It is assumptions, not logic, and often not even values, that require attention.

It reminds me of advocates of coal and oil. To reach them I had to address my readers’ thoughtfully, not just shout my feelings about societal suicide and call them fools.

Yes, but at the same time some of the coal and oil executives likely told themselves their path was righteous, or unavoidable, but knew there were alternatives to pursue. They lacked any remotely ethical excuse unlike the confusion others endured. In fact, I doubt history has any group as monstrous, risking as much mayhem for others, just to personally frolic on their own private estates while the rest of us suffer the flooded ruins beyond. Of course we had to stop that. On that front, RPS’s task was to prevent global ecological disaster while winning social gains that led to still more gains.

And finally, there was another lesson that would recur over and over. I learned how much one’s personal confidence matters to becoming active. Without confidence it was almost impossible to go where others wouldn’t. With confidence it became natural. No wonder mainstream schooling robbed confidence. We had to rebuild it. I also learned how important it was to make sure activism wasn’t personally so debilitating and alienating as to drive people away. Seeking a new world couldn’t be always wonderful but we had to make it as personally uplifting and fulfilling as we could.

Overcoming Resistance

Alexandria, as you became steadily more active, did you also encounter resistance based on cynicism? If so, how did you reply to it? And what impact did encountering this have on you and RPS?

We all encountered it—including inside our own feelings. For example, back when Trump became President nearly everyone I knew had moments of desperate depression and doubt. And while resistance to Trump grew quickly, and while to help with that we had to address various intermediate obstacles, once Trump was blocked, when we tried to go further we almost always encountered skeptical defeatism about human potentials. It sometimes reared up in ourselves, as well.

My way of replying, and of overcoming my own backsliding was indirect. I would ask people, “can you think of even one person who is not evil? Perhaps your grandmother, some personage, maybe yourself?” I could get everyone to say “yes, I have someone in mind.”

Then I would say, “okay, place that person on the social side of a ledger. Now list as many folks as you want on the anti social side, Hitler, Trump, the Clintons, the rest of your friends and family and yourself, or whoever comes to mind as evidencing your idea that people are just too evil and too anti social to attain desirable social institutions.”

“Now consider,” I would say to them, “that if evil was inevitably wired into human nature—like having kidneys, eyes, or a heart—everyone would be on the evil side of the ledger. That isn’t the case. And so evil is not inevitable. On the other hand, we know evil is possible because anti social folks certainly exist. We know evil can lie, manipulate, and fear monger its way into major office. So we know human nature allows people to become evil. To deny that would be ridiculous. It happens, therefore it is possible. But it is only possible. It allows people to justify evil, even to admire and prop up evil. That too is possible. But none of that is inevitable. Otherwise you, your grandmother, or whoever you indicated was nice, would be evil, would celebrate evil, and would even worship evil.

“So we have to ask, if anti sociality isn’t wired in, why are so many people so seriously greedy and violent or at least callous toward others, not just in their Trumpian moments, but a whole lot of the time?”

For the answer, I would urge whoever I was addressing to “look around at the institutional setting we all operate in. Consider it all together, and note how it produces and rewards the anti social and even the evil traits and tendencies you were calling part of human nature. Clearly our institutions reward and even require greed. They produce insecurity. They nurture violence, and they punish the more social and caring inclinations we also find in people. Since the latter persist, widely, it must be because the better traits are in our natures, albeit able to be muted. Our better sides certainly have nowhere else to come from. Surely society’s current institutions don’t foster them. On the other hand, the anti-social aspects of our behaviors, can be—and I would say they are—mostly produced by circumstances that impose them.”

Sometimes that kind of exchange would have to end there. For example. I remember many times giving talks, offering that viewpoint, and then moving on. But other times, discussions would go a lot longer. Maybe it was me and one other person. Or maybe it was talking with a group in an open-ended discussion in a dorm, bar, or workplace, or perhaps it was meeting with a group and going on as long as possible.

Such longer discussions would consider how our anti social roles mute our social inclinations and how they impose anti social inclinations instead. And this would be a very pertinent matter bearing on people’s deepest beliefs. The reasoning was trivial, yet the discussions were hard. A first, people would not hear the case. They would find my claims delusional. Yet this was not a logical difficulty. It was a difficulty people had accepting that they had taken false things for granted.

Did you have other ways of addressing the cynicism?

Sometimes I would borrow an approach I heard Noam Chomsky use at a talk he gave. “Imagine you are looking out a window on a really hot summer day,” he would say. “There is a kid with an ice cream cone. Along comes a big adult. The hulking figure takes the cone, swats the kid into the gutter, and walks on. Watching that from up in your window, do you say to yourself about the guy walking off with the ice cream, there goes a fine specimen of humanity? An average, typical bloke? Do you think to yourself, that guy’s human nature is freely expressing itself? Is gimme that ice cream and get out of my way in our genes like having a liver is in our genes? Do you think to yourself, I wish I could be as true to my real self as the ice cream grabber is being true to his real self? Or do you think, there goes a pathological deviant asshole who has been warped by his history or was perhaps born seriously messed up?”

Okay, those weren’t Chomsky’s exact words, but it was his meaning. And I heard Chomsky had another way of dealing with doubt that spurred inactivity that I did not like quite so much. He would say, “look, I know that if we do nothing, the result will be dismal or worse. On the other hand, if we work hard to win change, the result may be better. Surely we should try.”

Unsurprisingly, Chomsky’s logic was sound—was it ever not—but at least when I tried using that approach, it was most often ineffective. The problem seemed to me to be that people have difficult personal lives. They have alienated jobs. They suffer overtime and worry about their family. To give time, energy, and emotional focus to fighting for change incurs emotional, social, and often also material costs. A person who hears that to not fight for change abets collective suicide but to fight for change may accomplish something good would ask themselves, yes but will my personally fighting for social change offset losses it will cost for those I care about better than my choosing to directly benefit them will? For their answer to be yes required informed hope and a broader sense of solidarity than most have preserved against society’s emphasis on individualism. Inspiration, it seemed to me, often needed more then an entreaty that we ought to hedge against disaster.

I first reached these perceptions with my own parents and some close friends. I was on my activist path. They were quite progressive, quite liberal, but in no sense really trying to win fundamental change. And while the above approaches to inspiring involvement had some modest effect on some people who I talked with, any significant shift in their actual choices seemed to me to have to wait for them to gain a sense of efficacy and hope.

So, yes, I agree with many others that the root factor causing many to resist seeking change was not only but was certainly very often hopelessness. Events that would spontaneously generate hope such as a sudden massive dissent that betokened more to come were kryptonite for cynicism. Wide dissent like that that arose against Trump, or various wars, for example, momentarily struck at cynicism’s foundations. When resistance against the Israeli invasion got stated why did it go so far, when did it slow? One possible answer is that it took off because people felt here was something they could impact. Their effort would matter. When it slowed it was at least in considerable part because it didn’t immediately work and that, wrongly, caused people to think it couldn’t work. But you couldn’t provide that kind of jolt as an individual, not by yourself in a one on one discussion. Operating one to one, you had to resort to thought experiments like those about a loving grandma or an ice cream grabbing brute. And even socially sparked involvements needed something more if they were to persist through slow times. Writ larger, the effect of encountering so much cynicism on me and on many others was to eventually make us see that while we had to accurately criticize unjust relations and we had to show their roots and their catastrophic implications—doing that alone would rarely if ever generate sustained forward looking activism and would sometimes even stifle it.

So then what more did you need to provide?

Beyond overcoming imposed ignorance and willful rationalizations, we had to address people’s emotional resistance to becoming radically active. We had to overcome peoples’ view that we cannot win a better world because the enemy is too powerful for us to beat or because our natures are so anti social that any seeming victory will eventually slip into new oppression and deprivation. Even further, we had to provide hope that each person could personally contribute to such an undertaking in a meaningful and worthwhile way.

We had to make generating compelling vision and strategy a priority. We had to change the balance of our intellectual and organizing efforts. We tended to overwhelmingly emphasize what is wrong with current society and its oncoming dangers and say nearly nothing about what we really ultimately want. We needed to switch to instead mostly clarifying what a good society would look like and why it would be viable, worthy, and stable, as well as how we might help win it. That was a big turnaround. I, for example, went from constantly saying war kills, poverty starves, diminishment stifles, racism subjugates, bad is bad—and from constantly demonstrating how tenacious profit seeking, gender hierarchy, market competition, racial segregation, and political exclusion are—to showing what justice could mean in the shape of new fulfillment and new institutions and to showing how people’s choices could lead to justice by utilizing new ways of organizing and struggling. And I had to make that change, we all did, not only because it was required if we were to win, but because we really believed it and our truly believing it was critical because otherwise no one would believe us. I think that is what RPS mainly gave me in its  earliest days.

Early Momentum

Senator King, you were a student of history by schooling but an assembly worker and cook by early employment. You became a political candidate and ultimately a U.S. Senator. You were attracted to RPS and became a member, and then a prominent activist, and thereafter you ran for office within the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. Later, you became the first highly placed RPS national elected office holder and used your position and abilities to propel the RPS platform. I have to admit, It feels strange to interview a sitting U.S. Senator, but I am glad for the opportunity. I wonder, can you remember what precipitated you to become radical?

Please, call me Malcolm. And yes, I think I can. I was fascinated by history and that gave me great sympathy for those fighting against oppression and also considerable understanding of the institutions that create society’s ills. But however much I liked delving into history, when I got out of school I couldn’t get a history-related job. Instead, I worked as an assembler and also a short order cook, each of which ran in my family. I’d like to say I took those jobs out of solidarity and to learn, but honestly I was just up in the air about what to do and did what I got.

Then, luckily, and unexpectedly, as a result of having to do those jobs, I wasn’t looking at working class conditions as subject matter, like through a glass, or though a book as a student. I was living working class conditions at my job. I like to think that even had I gotten a teaching job at some elite institution, my life path would have been like what it has been, but I know the odds of that are really slim so I am thankful for what I horribly resented at the time—that I had to enter working class life and endure its injuries. Doing so gave me a life-defining gift, my radicalization.

Can you tell us which events, campaigns, or moments in RPS history were most moving for you personally?

Well, as you might expect, my becoming Senator of Massachusetts in 2036 changed me greatly and immensely affected my daily life. But, personally, two other moments jump out in my memory.

First was when Bernie Sanders died. I know, he wasn’t literally in RPS and his politics, at least publicly, never rose all the way to RPS fullness. But for me, his life and particularly his Presidential campaigns were pivotal to my own history, and his handling of himself, his way of engaging, his sense of proportion about his own role, and his compassion for poor and working people were all highly instructive and inspirational. At any rate, when he died, I was seriously distressed. The slogan, don’t mourn, organize, is fine for a dying revolutionary to intone as advice to others. But, honestly, for those who remain around, among those who really cared, while it may be good advice, it falls far short of reality. So I mourned, quietly, for Sanders. And that was an important period for me. What mattered to me became more concrete, and I have to say, death became more real as well.

Second, during the later campaign for Military and Prison Conversion, I happened to give a speech at a U.S. military base in Texas. After the event, I sat around with some soldiers and we talked about their experiences and motives, and what the conversion campaign might mean for them. I was greatly impressed by their thoughtfulness, their concern for the country, and their concerns for themselves and their families, albeit encountering even at that late date massive confusion about various underlying facts.

The proximity of change for the soldiers’ lives, and the sober calm and scope of the conversion campaign caused our exchanges to be heartfelt and sincere. When disruption knocks on your door it gets your attention well beyond how abstractions typically register. The discussions with the soldiers went for many hours and covered incredible ground. The lessons I took about the need to hear peoples’ actual reasons for their feelings and beliefs and not just reasons that were imputed to them from a distance, often by media oblivious to their experiences, and to relate to those real reasons in ways that could create solidarity rather than stir up fear and antipathy made my later interactions with lots of different constituencies much wiser.

Looking back, and getting back on sequence, what do you think fed into the early boycotts and many other such projects and campaigns emerging when they did?

I think the proximate cause was energy that spread outward from the March on Wall Street and still earlier, plus the stupendously evil Israeli assault on Palestinians that engaged a whole lot of activism. But I also know that earlier there was the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, MeToo, and still more broadly, the Sanders campaign and its aftermath, plus the magnificent turn out of women and their supporters to kick off the sustained massive resistance to Trumpism, and so much more that followed. We could of course go further back, also, to earlier outpourings of resistance, and not only in the U.S., where I was, but around the world. And of course the anti-Trump opposition itself persisted and grew. I experienced all that, and all that contributed to what I and others became. At bottom I guess I realized that as Malcolm X put it, “if you don’t stand for what’s right you are likely to fall for what’s wrong.”

I also came to realize that a single effort at change rarely wins much, but when carried through intelligently, each single effort provides lessons and sentiments that can help inform a next effort and then another. The result is never a continuous, uninterrupted piling on of desires, capacities, and gains. It is, instead, that at best you win some, you lose some. The trick, I began to really understand, is to learn from the losses so the gains accumulate and feed off each other.

Many activities before RPS aroused worthy desires. Many taught useful skills. Many conveyed needed confidence and overcame time worn biases. But not everyone involved at each stage experienced all such changes. Many would gain new inclinations for a time and then lose those inclinations due to the pressures of having to return to the daily humdrum of filling their current social roles in order to survive. Their lives, aroused for a time, would begin to regress when they then became silent about things that mattered—and yet, in time, many could and did return. Others would retain some lessons, skills, feelings, and hope, and would bring those gains to the next round of activity. That is what mattered most, a forward trajectory of change.

If a movement hits a pretty high point but fails to keep growing, then as far as winning change, it is deficient. A movement has to be continually busy being born, or it will be busy dying. It is always the right time to do what is right.

This was true not only for earlier struggles that ultimately died, but also for the arms boycotts. There were campuses where twenty or thirty percent of the students and faculty were vigorously active and as much as eighty percent agreed with ending war research. But as the dust temporarily settled, sometimes with total divestment, sometimes partial, sometimes with oversight for projects, sometimes with new projects elsewhere that took their place, most of the students and faculty who had been even highly involved went back to their prior approaches of going to or teaching classes. They went along to get along. And to watch that, I won’t sugar coat it, often felt like a plague of passivity settling in. But RPS took notice and began to understand that understandable but devastating tendency, and that not cops, laws, or bribes, was our biggest enemy. We realized that amidst all else we would undertake in any campaign, a major priority had to be ensuring that people’s involvement persisted past the specific campaign’s end.

Andre, you were intimately involved in all this. Was your experience similar to Malcolm’s?

I saw declines and I was saddened by it. I could even have been totally sidetracked by it and there were low moments when I almost was. But instead, I guess I ultimately saw the optimistic side more intensely. I saw that some people in each campaign, kept on keeping on. And I also saw that even the folks who went back to their prior ways had a residue of the boycott experience living on in their minds and I knew it could resurface not too long later if those who kept active did good work.

So what was your impression of the significant number who did not return to prior choices?

We were changed and retained the changes. The changes meant we no longer fit our prior patterns. A few of us became social misfits. We were shattered and for a time unable to function well due to our outrage at all the injustice around us. The bitter feelings interfered with us engaging thoughtfully. But others who stayed involved became designers of new slots for ourselves. We decided society had to fundamentally change and we resolved to help make it happen. We became part of the flow leading toward RPS along with those who had learned from earlier campaigns against Trump’s vile policies and whatnot else.

Other gains occurred at that time and led toward RPS as well. Perhaps most importantly, at least as I saw it, activists began to realize that the right criterion for judging events, whether meetings, campaigns, boycotts, strikes, occupations, or whatever, wasn’t did our effort immediately win what was directly demanded. It wasn’t did we achieve the disruption or even the change that we directly sought. The real criteria was did our effort increase consciousness, desire, organization, and commitment in ourselves and in the larger circles of people our activities communicated with. This new criterion for judging our efforts helped birth RPS. It was a big step toward “Movement first” thinking replacing “me and mine first” thinking. Moving from thinking only our feelings and our small group matter to instead thinking mass action and outward effects matter. It was part of moving from having long run desire inform short run anger instead of having short run anger dictate long-run outcomes.

What makes you think that transition occurred?

A lot of things, not least my experiencing it myself. But here was one particularly stark indicator. Consider a major demonstration called to shut down some elite meeting. The anti globalization demonstrations, way earlier, in Seattle, were, at least from my studies, a good example. In earlier cases, like in that case, in the initial organizing the focus of activist commentary was on substantive issues. What was the meeting that activists aimed to disrupt all about? Why was it a heinous gathering? Why did we demonstrators oppose it? What did we demonstrators want beyond merely shutting it down? After the new criteria gained sway, this type of focus persisted for such endeavors right through when they occurred and into the aftermath. But before the new criteria gained sway, pretty early on and steadily more so as events neared, organizers and left media would shift overwhelmingly from focusing on the issues of the movement and on the aims of the meeting and the larger scale aims of opposing the meeting, to just technical details of blocking the meeting and especially how to deal with police. The tone became stop the meeting, we win. Fail to stop the meeting, police win. This was remarkable because of course elites won as soon as that became the substance of discussion. For that to become the focus meant real radical insights faded from view. It meant organizers and activists could be easily crushed. Coerce us into tactical retreat and you win, we lose.

In any case, with the change to new criteria, our priority became to develop an approach that was about how today’s choices impact tomorrow, not about whether today’s action accomplishes some specific short term tactical aim right now. When RPS members later organized to stop some meeting, or to win some campaign, our demands and actions mattered to us for the immediate benefit they could deliver to worthy recipients, but also for how they laid a basis for winning more gains in the future.

This insight caused me and many other activists to deeply realize that being a revolutionary wasn’t mainly about supporting particular ideas or even having a transformative vision. It wasn’t mainly about courage or even organizational ties. That all mattered greatly, of course, but even beyond all that, being a revolutionary was mainly about having a new attitude. Life had to reorient from being firstly about one’s day to day concerns, one’s job, or even an immediate short term progressive agenda, to being about winning a changed society. “I am revolutionary” came to mean that the organizing principle guiding my life is to win a new society.

[Author’s Note: I hope readers will continue with this serialization’s weekly excerpts. The next excerpt’s interviewees Senator Malcolm King and Andre Goldman will discuss the 2016 Election. While waiting for Excerpt 3, I hope you will find some time to use Z’s Community Forum to provide reactions, criticisms, advice, and whatever else you would like to share about this article to help improve the project. I also hope you will listen to the next RevolutionZ podcast episode which will offer diverse interjections of additional thoughts, questions, criticisms, reasons, and hopes for what you have just read.]

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