In which Reverend Stephen Du Bois, Robin Kunstler, Leslie Zinn, and Lydia Luxemburg discuss Religious Renovation, Legal Upheaval, and Media Makeovers

[Author’s Note: This is the sixth excerpt from a work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This excerpt will also provide the substance for a forthcoming  RevolutionZ episode. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections made by the host on hearing the material aloud. In this written version at the suggestions of a reader I have decided to try including those “interjections.” The hope is the episode will help to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke those who hear it to contribute to discussions about vision and especially strategy for social change.

And a further note, for those who have been listening to the podcasts of the NAR Episodes, you know that I have been interjecting additional narrator commentary as I go along. At a listener’s suggestion, I have decided to try that, as well, in article versions, or at least in this article, So here goes.]

Religious Renovations

Stephen Du Bois, you were a seminary student at the time of the first RPS convention, and you later became a priest in a progressive church in San Francisco. Famous for your hunger strikes, you became highly influential and active in the development of RPS policies regarding religion and ecology. To start, I wonder, do you remember how you first became radical?

When I was 16 I read a book about global warming. I was mind blown. How could this happen. How could people allow it to happen. I then read more about ecology, and then about economy. Before long I was Green, then anti capitalist. I became a priest and started to become socially involved. It was natural to join RPS.

Can you remember a particular event or situation during the rise of RPS that was especially moving or inspiring for you?

I remember many. The Religious Renovations movement has defined my life, as but one example. But the thing that now comes to mind had to do, I guess a bit strangely, with rape and prostitution.

I was a young pastor. I was taking confession from an equally young parishioner. She was incredibly distraught while confessing that desperate for income she had begun selling herself. She had endured rape, earlier, and now she was raped for a fee.

She knew what was happening, with incredible accuracy, and she did it anyhow. She knew the price, and she paid it. She knew the future, and she abided it. She was miserable, but saw no other way to escape destitute hunger.

I heard the misery and pathos of it all, and I was supposed to be strong in reply. Like a doctor over a dying patient I guess, I was not supposed to let it affect my countenance or my ability to reason, but it did. And it stayed with me and affected how I started seeing everything.

For a time, it was only debilitating. I saw pain everywhere. I saw vile injustice and inhumanity toward anyone who lacked means, everywhere. And I was furious at it. I don’t know if that was a necessary step, or not. But it was my path.

By the time RPS emerged, I still saw it all, felt it all, but now there was a positive aspect. I had fury, but I also had some hope and direction. I was less into complaining and whining than earlier, and more into dogged work and striving.

But without that young woman—and I have no idea, to my permanent shame, whatever became of her—would I have become who I am? I don’t know. Maybe. But I doubt it. There but for her, perhaps I would have been just another priest, turned off to the pathos he encountered save to do his “professional” duty and earn his keep.

Miguel replies… Religious participation in social activism has been a constant, but so has religious opposition to change. How would you characterize the emergence of new religious activism in the early RPS period?

I would call it a continuation of what had been best in earlier religious involvement, as well as a challenge to what had been worst.

[Narrator — This strikes me as already a little different than usual wherein one might say, “I would call it us overturning everything.” Stephen could instead acknowledge what was right or at least instructive and needed even as he hated and thought about how to replace what was not right.]

Stephen continues:

To extend the best, RPS enlarged the efforts of many religions and churches to directly challenge oppressive cultural and economic relations.

To challenge the worst, RPS urged many religions and churches to jettison relations, beliefs, and rituals that mirrored social injustices and prevented practitioners from challenging those injustices or even made religious practitioners actively support them.

Can you give an example or two of each aspect as it was roughly 20 years ago, when RPS was first emerging?

First two examples of the best. Churches had become profoundly active in the Sanctuary Movements opposing Trump’s earlier Islamophobia, Jingoism, and racism as RPS was being conceived and the first convention planned. At the same time, and following the same pattern, Churches expanded their efforts to address hunger and homelessness, but they didn’t only open their doors to provide holiday meals, or only support homeless shelters, or protect folks facing deportation, though they certainly did all those things. Two innovations occurred.

First, for people using the meals and housing or seeking sanctuary, many churches urged participation in skills development and discussion programs based largely on RPS insights. These learning programs were meant to empower those involved by conveying skills that could help them find a job and also seek social change.

And the second innovation was that church members and clergy participated in those programs equally with the hungry and homeless participants, and then in local activist political campaigns as well. The impact on people who needed to become involved in efforts at change cannot be exaggerated.

Was this a bit like what right wing churches had been doing for many years?

In some ways, yes, it was, and at the time I remember thinking quite hard about this possible criticism. The reactionary approach had been to steal and then bribe. First right wing politicians would eliminate social services to leave poor families desperate. Then mega churches would offer meeting spaces, food banks, social gathering places, job training, and so on. The condition for receiving the services was simple. Go along with the beliefs of the church, at least nominally—by attending services. Get some real benefits but only if you ratify and even become one with homophobia, sexism, and the rest.

This was also the way of the fundamentalist madrases in Pakistan and indeed it may even have arrived in the U.S. church community by way of emulating the fundamentalists abroad. Destroy public services. Supply replacements. Require fealty to get the replacements. Despicable aims but smart strategy to attain them.

But isn’t what you were describing a left version of the same process?

In some ways, it is, yes, which is why I had to think quite a lot about it before becoming a militant advocate for it. The difference was that our approach was without coercion and had different content.

When a poor person availed themselves of food or housing or other benefits that an RPS-oriented church offered, it was true they would be asked to participate in discussion circles and in training programs of diverse kinds, and then also in social struggle to win public delivery of the missing services as well as broader changes in society. But joining the efforts was optional. You got what you were asking for regardless.

And then the content of further involvement, if one chose to pursue it, wasn’t about isolating, ridiculing, and dominating others. It was about advancing one’s community while supporting other communities as well.

If a Nazi party hands out a leaflet, and an anti war group hands out a leaflet, the physical acts are similar but the content, emotions, and ideas are monumentally dissimilar.

[Narrator — I think this may be a little more thorny than Stephen’s answer. Think of an authority figure having sex with a young student. Maybe the prof is really nice and caring and not exploiting, but the relationship might be anyhow. And its consequences. I suspect RPS writ larger probably spent more time figuring out how to have its members and organizations engage with people not yet involved, seek gains for and with them, want them to join, and yet have it occur without even subtle manipulation or authority at work.]

Miguel asks: What about inward looking innovation?

Two examples come to mind, Miguel, of the many that arose in the Religious Renovations movements. First was opening all roles in various churches to women which continued efforts already underway.

Second, less a continuation and more an innovation, was aggressively questioning church hierarchy and wealth. Beyond providing emergency food and shelter based on donations earmarked to that end, why not work to redistribute the gargantuan wealth accumulated by religious communities to the communities that constituted their constituencies?

And, beyond including women as full participants, why not challenge the authoritarian nature of religious hierarchies and their power over those below, in essence, improving the religious roles so they would deserve female participation?

There was another more subtle innovation, as well. RPS tried to understand and overcome what might be called tribalism. This was the tendency of groups, religious and otherwise, to see themselves as worthy but to see others as potential opponents to diminish. All this started to get very serious not long after RPS started growing, and as you know, the trends have continued ever since.

At the time of the first RPS convention, what did you think ought to be the role of religions and belief in God?

I was still in school to become a pastor in a local church in a working class mixed race neighborhood in my home state of Ohio. I saw religion as a moral compass for society. I believed, already, that religion should steer clear of claims about how things are—such as religious anti-science—and should only provide values, and sometimes, when needed, insights about what social relations could deliver the sought values. I also thought religions ought to embody what they preached, and the history of violence and sexual predation of even my own religion was incredibly disconcerting to me.

I thought the God aspect was a matter for each person to navigate as they chose. If one person devoutly believed in god but had a value system that served him or her but forsook everyone else, and another person did not believe in god devoutly or even at all, but had a value system that served all equally, I felt the moral atheist was a far better model of what we needed for the future than the self serving theist.

I should note that no one I went to school with ever explicitly disagreed with that contention while they were a student, yet the church, including our schooling and the hierarchy we were headed for, did of course disagree with it. I guess you could say I was ready for a new type of religious commitment even before its wide arrival.

[Narrator — the image of students having one set of attitudes and then winding up by what in considerable part you might call on the job molding, with another set of attitudes is to me relevant across society, not just for seminary and priesthood. Do you, reading this, feel like I do presenting this for you, that there were lots more questions to pursue, likely ruled out by time and space considerations, but which perhaps you might consider?]

Miguel next asks: What did you make of religious fundamentalism?

When I was a student we all knew it existed. of course. Earlier, Trump’s first campaign introduced it, I guess, to those still unaware. When he later ran a second time, it was truly prominent, perhaps in some ways even dominant in the Republican Party,. In fact, by then Republicans officials were more or less in thrall to it and dependent on it.

The third time he ran, well, that was just beyond the beyond. The thing about it was, as I came to understand it, that there was no there, there. Or more accurately, the public Trumpian framework could justify literally anything. For example when confronted about the incompetence, malevolence, or vile personal life and views of a candidate, a fan could say, well of course I am supporting Trump or whoever it might be.

I mean God is in all things, directly in all our lives. And neither Trump nor any other such candidate would be running and winning unless God wanted it. More anyone who accepts Jesus (or whoever or whatever) can do God’s work, but if one doesn’t accept Jesus, then one can’t God’s work.

So these fundamentalists actually saw personal failure as irrelevant, and sometimes even an argument for one’s support arguing the flawed person can repent due to their faith and wouldn’t have got where they are unless God made it so.

The incredible inconsistencies, even if you accepted all the assumptions, just slid by. To me it seemed to be overwhelmingly a matter of loyalty to a kind of tribal identify, not a matter of reason or even a twisted morality. Thankfully it only went so far though for a while I admit I feared that Trumpism had become outright fascism and that occurring as it was around the world, it might be unstoppable.

How did religious involvements start to alter, in practice, as RPS grew? What were some of the important milestone steps along the way?

It was different in different regions, but overall, rituals began to accord better with social values, which themselves also began to alter.

Milestones? Women becoming priests was a big one. Just imagine an otherwise caring priest or parishioner, much less a higher official, who firmly believed that women priests would destroy religion, trying to relate to parishioners who would no longer attend if that stance persisted, or having students who considered such views insane, albeit they tried to be civil about it.

This was tumultuous, and yet in Church time, it happened very quickly, just as gay marriage advances had earlier been absent and even unthinkable, and were then accepted in a very short span, albeit subject to continuing attack.

Of course, there had been endless earlier conflict, but the surge of various recent successes was undeniably quick. The unstated assumptions or habits, as well as the emblazoned beliefs of religions fractured and their doing so revealed the limited sense in which the slippery slope fears of people who were trying to hold on to old ways were actually warranted.

When a fundamental feature of some institution is assaulted and finally overcome and replaced, a broader lesson is learned.

Change is possible. The immovable moves. The insurmountable is surmounted. Those fearing that changes in some horrible aspect that they too didn’t even like would spread to many other aspects that they did like, had a point. Change can indeed unleash more change. The task of activists was not to deny that truth, but to admit it and take responsibility for ensuring that all ensuing changes would be good.

The massive outpouring of activism across religions in the multi city, many million person marches that simultaneously ratified both religious freedom and religious devotion to social justice, was another incredible milestone.

This time the implicit message was that our sacrosanct old ways really are old and often habitual. They sometimes not only lacked sound moral and logical foundation, they even lacked support. We the people were ready to revolutionize our lives and also our religions. Of course when various major leaders like the Pope got on board with demands for major changes, that helped speed things up.

What was the role of your personal hunger strike in all this? And what about controversy and opposition? How did that emerge and what was done to address it?

As for the hunger strike, I like to think it generated a lot of visibility and provoked many conversations leading to new views for people.

As to opposition, well, as you can imagine, there were two main kinds. On the one hand, those high in various religious communities did not want to surrender their power and influence, nor their elevated living conditions. Their hostility to me while I was doing the strike shook me, I admit, and of course persisted into opposing our marches and other endeavors and policy changes.

However, no one literally said they wanted to preserve their own elevated circumstances. You could read it in some people’s words and actions, but they would claim that they were trying to avoid dissolution of faith and a collapse of morality that would harm everyone, especially those least prepared to withstand it. But then the same people would often act in ways that displayed not the slightest concern for precisely the people in less well off communities.

So, if concern for denigrated people wasn’t really operative, and it often wasn’t, what was left? Self interest was the obvious answer. But, in fact, most often, when I actually talked to people to try to hear their thinking, I found it wasn’t solely self interest at work, even for defenders of the past.

For one, I realized that those who were benefitting materially from their place in religious hierarchies weren’t the only source of resistance to change. Instead there were huge numbers of parishioners as well, including ones who were horribly poor, who resisted each and every innovation, including even innovations that would very clearly materially and socially benefit them. How could I explain that? How could I explain when a poor parishioner would be hostile to my hunger strike against poverty, or to our anti-poverty marches?

Consider someone who believes in some value or norm, say the person you have in mind is anti war. Along comes a war. Suppose society overwhelmingly supports it. The anti war person can support it, shut up, or oppose it. The last of these options could incur social ostracism, perhaps loss of a job, or perhaps even jail.

Yet, such a person would often choose to oppose the war. Why?

Well, it isn’t open and shut. There is more than one possible explanation. But suppose the person has a bunch of like-minded friends. Maybe retaining their friendship is a more powerful pressure than fearing broader social ostracism or even jail. In that case the choice to oppose the war may have had little to do with attitudes to war per se.

Or suppose the person had become so vested in peace beliefs and habits that to renounce them intuitively seems like a kind of psychological suicide and is for that reason reflexively rejected. Or perhaps the person truly believes in the morality and necessity of peace, and steadfastly pursues the implications of that belief.

Now suppose we return to a parishioner resisting innovative views about marriage, abortion, or obedience and initiative, and getting hostile to those seeking change. Clearly any number of factors analogous to those mentioned for our hypothetical opponent of war could push his or her choice.

Our culture tends to impose on us a habit of assuming the worst about others. In this case, that would be to assume people defending old ways do so only out of narrow self interest or vile personal attitudes. But that worst possibility, while sometimes partly accurate, isn’t always completely accurate and is sometimes totally inaccurate. To reflexively take the worst explanation for granted without having very serious supporting evidence, is therefore not only often wrong, but also unfair.

For these reasons, RPSers who sought religious change against some parishioner opposition by and large assumed the best of our adversaries and tried to calmly, patiently, and supportively address the resistance we encountered on its own stated terms. As we know, the results, though still in process, have been admirable and desirable, though not without difficulty. And I have to say, I think that approach, not solely originating in religious turmoil, but largely so, did spread throughout RPS until it became a kind of internal commitment. Actually, if you go back and look at how MLK JR. operated, at his talks, you can see an incredibly eloquent early version of the same approach.

[Narrator — These RPS folks do seem alike in various respects. And this “assume good motives and good hopes, and listen hard approach,” does seem to be a kind of recurring theme beyond each of their one-off detailed engagements of RPS member lessons. The repetition seems to say this is important, but is it?]

Miguel continues – Stephen, how has your thought on the place of religion in society changed over the past 20 years? When you think about the future of religion after RPS fully succeeds, what do you see?

Honestly, I don’t know that my thought about religion has changed very much. Twenty years ago I knew it made zero sense that there were all these views of god, different from one another, held by different religions. The idea that one view, and thus one god, was right and all the rest were wrong was downright silly. Same thing held for there being an omniscient and all unyieldingly good God. Look around…clearly its a silly claim.

I used to watch athletes perform wonderfully and then thank God. It wasn’t just the incredible egoism that bothered me. I wondered what they thought would be the reason god pushed them higher, or faster, or whatever then she pushed their opponent.

God has my back but not yours. Really? I was pretty certain that they couldn’t possibly literally believe what their words suggested. It felt to me more like people playing a role to retain credibility. To retain friends. To remain welcome in one’s tribe.

[Narrator — Was it that? Is it that? What about it being an attempt at grounding oneself, or is that just the same thing? Or what about it being belief independent of what anyone else thinks? More, this makes me wonder, when Miguel looks for lessons from these many revolutionaries are we seeing a fraction of their lives and thoughts, a shared aspect which, however minimizes the whole, diminishes the whole? Or are we seeing a shared essence that shines toward the whole? Are the interviews revealing what mattered to revolution only, what can allow life to diversify and flourish against horrid historical but contingent oppression, or are they revealing what is a diversified, flourishing life? I think only the former? What do you think?]

Stephen continues –

But, I also knew that you are what you do, and if you play a role often enough, long enough, eventually you commit to it, often incredibly tenaciously. Clearly, all were equally wrong in touting that their god was true and everyone else’s god was false, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make themselves feel that they were right about it. And nor did their coming to feel right about it alter that any priest who ratified their views was largely standing naked. Have you ever thought about the label god-fearing people? Almost seems perverse, doesn’t it?

For me, well I believe that what actually matters about any religion is the worthy values it extolls and whichever rituals and relations its members have that flexibly embody, teach, and apply those values. I believe that completely dismissing religion is a fool’s errand, because dismissal had no prospect in real human interrelations. Humanity is not going to forego religion, by which I mean shared values and consistent rituals and celebrations, nor should it. Having various cultural codifications of moral sentiment and attitudes seems to me to be a good and needed aspect of life. Fundamentalism however seems to me to suffocate the good right out of religion.

I guess the thing I didn’t have clarity about years back, and that I hadn’t really come to terms with, was the role of ritual in it all. Was there a place for well conceived rituals? Was it reasonable to require abiding particular rituals as a condition for involvement in some a particular religion? I am still not entirely sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, rituals provide a sense of shared experience and community, and, if they embody sought values, then they are also a positive learning experience and reminder. On the other hand, it is very hard for mandatory rituals not to become impositions that demand obedience. Where should we draw a line, and how should we draw it—for that matter is there about this too one line or many? I am still unclear about all that—and I think RPS is too.

I hope a conception of flexible and growth-oriented ritual emerges that includes, I guess, a considerable burden of proof on rejecting what has a heritage of success, but at the same time also sees positive value in questioning everything, including so that accepted ritual can be improved. But can an old version of a ritual and a different new version, or even a complete replacement, coexist simultaneously in one religion? That is not so easy to answer.

As far as the implications of a full RPS success for religion, I think many are evident in the changes so far. There will still be diverse religions. Many will still identify with and to greater or lesser extents relate to religious rituals. But each religion will respect the efficacy of the rest. And the heart of the matter will be the values extolled and lived.

No religion will think it ought to imperially spread and wipe out others. Nor will any religion need to circle the wagons and fight for survival because society will self consciously collectively guarantee the rights of religions to persist and will provide means to ensure it. Diversity will be a value all can comprehend and support.

[Narrator — was it my own confusions about religion, or Stephen’s, or RPS’s that complexified the above account? I don’t know. But, in any case, at this point Miguel moved on to a new focus by asking:]

Robin, you were a criminal trial lawyer who has experienced countless major crime cases, but you rebelled at the injustices of the criminal justice system and became active not only in aiding RPS members accosted by the state, but also in developing RPS conceptions and policies bearing on judicial affairs. You also became the first Shadow Supreme Court Justice. I wonder, do you remember how you first became radical?

I was practicing law, but came to think that I was, instead, practicing human herding. The legal system came to me to resemble a corrupt concoction of victim revenge and social control through intimidation and fear. It was poker played with human chips. We brokered guilt, innocence, jail terms, and fines by barter, bullying, manipulation, and graft. Power and wealth ruled.

For your question, I got furious before I got focused. I often went home at day’s end ill at what I had seen, and sometimes, sadly, at what I had been part of. Imagine repeatedly plea bargaining innocent lives into prison as the only way to avoid their suffering still longer sentences at the hands of prosecutors and judges padding their resumes.

For that matter, imagine getting someone off who was guilty and, worse, would have no recourse to survive on reentering society other than more crime. The prisons, with rare exceptions, did nothing to rehabilitate, that is to teach. Instead they would spit graduates, if you will, back into society to take up where they left off.

I started to educate myself about why my daily experience was so Kafkaesque. Rip off drugs from a pharmacy for a sick child—and go to jail. Produce and sell addictive drugs via a thousand pharmacies for profit with no less greed or violence than heads of drug cartels displayed—and ride a private jet to Washington DC to get an award. I came to want justice brought about by people, not by judges, prosecutors, wardens, or police officers who all served the vile establishment.

[Narrator —I think Robin is not just saying what is, and how harsh it is, but also something about the power of what is sometimes called culture, or common sense, or normalization, as these exist in society. They become a background that we accept, a background that permeates our choices until there is a break, until the mosaic of roles and beliefs that is society is rewritten, recast, revolutionized. Maybe RPS was not only about rewriting society but also about discovering a desirable design or standard or shape to guide that rewrite. But is there only one such rewrite worth pursuing?]

Robin continues:

I then discovered two streams of thinking that gave me perspective and direction. One was about the law’s corrupt implementation. The second, even more crucial, was about the broader society’s implications for what the law in practice was permitted and required to be.

But all of it was at that point in my mind. It was just ideas. Even as my views changed, I was a practitioner only modestly different than I had been earlier. I had a role. I filled it. So I would say I was first truly revolutionized when I decided that to be a worthy practitioner of worthy law required being a committed agent of justice as an even higher calling than upholding law. It happened one day visiting a client in a prison where he did not belong. I left the meeting depressed, angry, and finally, newly focused. Like a hurricane leveling all in its path, I was suddenly hit by what ought to have been an unavoidable reality of my profession. Law without justice was regimented. It was rationalized. It was evil. My journey to that awareness had been long and difficult. My journey from there to RPS was natural and swift.

While we are on your personal experience, as I have asked others, can you perhaps recount for us a particularly inspiring or moving experience for you from the period of RPS’s rise?

The 2027 legal workers conference was central to my agenda ever after. But there was a more private experience, actually, you might call it a network of such experiences, that I think mattered greatly for who I became. It was my interactions as a defense attorney with clients, and with prosecutors, judges, and police.

On the client side, it was hearing all manner of reports of people’s lives and how they were stultifying and deadly and how they produced drug addictions and anti sociality but also efforts to survive and especially to help one’s children survive, as well as, truth be told, sometimes sadistic violence.

For me, that illegal acts were very often part of client stories was of only indicative consequence. The real message was that society was a meat grinder and these people were its meat. Society was a pile driver and these people were its pile. Society rolled over people, buried people, burned people. My clients. To carry on, they often found seriously nasty paths.

On the other side, all too often you had relatively well off highly schooled prosecutors, including District Attorneys, well off judges including at District or Supreme level, and police, including those on the beat up to chiefs. The empathy these folks had for the accused was often less than zero. The focus these folks had on legality, much less justice, was also nearly zero save when it served their aims. Their abiding concern was clearing dockets. Tallying victories. They sought convictions to avoid embarrassment and advance their careers. They saw and addressed so much violence and hate that they pretty much took for granted that anyone who they rousted and arrested was either guilty of what they were accused of, or guilty of equally bad or worse. For them, getting them put away was a righteous act, no matter what kind of tactics got it done.

What about defense attorneys?

Good question. It was not so different at its core on the team that sometimes cared more, but often, not too much, if at all. Win. Get the payment. Get visibility to get new payments. Abide the beat downs. Obey the rules.

The system that was bending both sides was beneath rotten. It was so horrendous in its practice and so empty of sincere values despite its undeniably high sounding rhetoric that whatever the final shape of law would need to be, I realized complete overhaul was required.

It wasn’t that everyone or even most or many who were involved in the legal professions started out immoral or amoral. Ironically it was that their conditions and circumstances produced that outcome sort of like how criminals were also created by social circumstances. What a mess it was. And so, I was on a path that RPS illuminated.

RPS has recognized that the advocate model in which lawyers work on behalf of clients regardless of guilt or innocence makes considerable sense. Can you perhaps summarize that?

Well, mainly, we don’t want people defending themselves so that those who are good at doing so have a tremendous advantage over those who are not good at doing so. Put differently, we don’t want skills unrelated to the facts of some dispute or criminal trial prevailing over those facts. And yet, if you think about it, being able to overcome facts was the legal profession’s road to riches.

It followed that we needed well-trained lawyers and prosecutors who are available to all disputants equally and who would try hard for everyone. That was roughly the existing logic, albeit it was often neglected, ignored, or violated by the different abilities and especially different resources of clients and lawyers and in all manner of other aspects of lawyering. At any rate, the defense was supposed to try to win regardless of any attitude about the defendant. The prosecution was supposed to also try to win, but at least in theory only the cases where it believes in the guilt of the defendant.

Yet, RPS has qualms about this approach?

Again, in theory, it makes some sense that in court confrontations defense attorneys should seek to win favorable verdicts regardless of their knowledge of the true guilt or innocence of the accused, and that prosecutors, once they bring a case, should pull out all stops to win regardless of misgivings they have, unless they perceive certain innocence. But the fact that prosecutors’ reputations depend on victories means they work to win by any means they can muster even when they do have indications of innocence, and, in any event, the idea that this legalistic face-off will yield the greatest probability of truthful results strikes most in RPS, myself included, as about as believable, in certain respects, as the injunction that everyone in an economy should seek selfish private gain as the best means of benefiting society and achieving sociality. Be greedy and the outcome will be sociality. Really? How different is seek victory not truth and truth will emerge? But in doubting the legal system we encountered a problem. What is the alternative? It can’t be that if a lawyer doesn’t like a client, the client gets a poor defense.

Of course the dangers inherent in judicial methodology are incredibly aggravated by role structures where lawyers and prosecutors gain income and promotions from gaining sought verdicts, regardless of justice. This part, the perverse income incentives, RPS of course sought to remove from the outset by imposing the norms of equitable remuneration.

And, indeed, the corruption and perversion of role-induced self-seeking was our focus when some lawyers, law clerks, and even a few judges and prosecutors began to question the whole system and many of us began turning toward RPS for community while doing so. Yet, we knew that even after those involved in jurisprudence would become recipients of equitable incomes correlated to effort and duration, not to mention having balanced jobs, the pursuit of worthy justice by trials as we had known them would also entail considerable alterations from current trial practices. However, how to best modify or replace the combination of courts, judges, juries, and aggressive advocacy with different mechanisms, we didn’t claim to know and is even now still evolving.

So it is still pretty much an open question for RPS, even twenty years since RPS’s founding and even as it is moving toward victory in society?

Yes, I am afraid parts of it are, at least in my mind. It is quite hard to conceive an approach to investigating and adjudicating cases in ways that virtually guarantee truthful and just outcomes. My guess is there is probably no one right way. Rather, it may be necessary to have a number of different trial methodologies where selection of which methodology we use depends on the context of the particular case, and is a first step to decide before proceeding with actual adjudication—though, of course, then how a method is chosen becomes an issue.

I should perhaps add that another factor is the new technology for knowing when someone is lying. That lie detection has become so portable—like in your pocket—and inexpensive, and thus so prevalent, introduces considerable new complexity to trials and to daily life too. We are getting close to a situation where lying is virtually impossible, and, as many commentators have been exploring, that is a big deal in many parts of life, both personal and social, including trials.

[Narrator — Here Miguel changed the topic, or maybe edited his transcripts, who knows? I think Robin was about to get into how technical innovations that occurred in his time, almost three decades beyond our time, had big effects. Did Miguel consciously decide to avoid such content? Did he leave it on the cutting room floor? Or was that me, channeling his oral history, to avoid page after page of what would, if included, be science and engineering at the expense of social relations and personal experiences? In either event, was it a good choice or do you miss hearing hypotheticals about flying cars, pocket lie detectors, and smart, smarter, and perhaps super smart AI? I feel like all that would have and presumably did have serious implications, but that lessons for personal choices of potential readers in our time (other than, I guess, for engineers and scientists) would get lost amidst descriptions of new products. Was it a good or bad choice to leave all that out?]

Miguel continues, Robin, what are some aspects of judicial innovation that RPS has arrived at supporting, and some of the processes at root of that?

After the opening RPS convention, some lawyers and even some prosecutors, and many trial assistants became very interested in RPS. Before long there were meetings and a conference to discuss possibilities. The first area that came up for serious review was not courtroom dynamics, but policing and punishment.

Policing, always problematic in many ways, particularly in the U.S., had grown steadily more divorced from anything anyone might deem exemplary in the couple of decades before the first RPS convention. On the one hand, and most visibly, there had been an incredible growth if not in police violence toward minorities, certainly in awareness of it, even including all too frequent extrajudicial killings—legalized murders. And as horrific as that was, arguably an even larger problem was our astronomically inflated rates of incarceration which in all too many cases accomplished little more than schooling the arrested person in becoming a more effective criminal, since there was no other avenue back into society more likely to yield even modest stability and comfort than to commit more crime.

So the initial focus of judicially-related RPS work, which was a product of judicially involved RPS members—as well as and even more so, extra-judicial movements of inmates and inmate’s families and over-policed communities—was to demand intelligent community control of police, renovation of police training policies, demilitarization of police forces, and renovation of judicially-related remuneration and job roles, plus renovation of punishment to emphasize rehabilitation and productive contribution to society, fellow prisoners, and self.

[Narrator — Miguel at this point included, I think perhaps cut and pasted from another interviewee’s session, though I guess it also may be that Peter was present with Stephen as the layout suggests, a part that he must have earlier left out, but he here wanted to include. Maybe my wondering at the abruptness reflects Miguel’s having as much trouble keeping track of all the various stories and pieces of stories he had heard, while merging and shuffling them as I have had trouble keeping track as I present them for you. In any case, in his oral history text, Miguel continued…]

Peter, if I could revisit with you, I think I forgot to ask earlier, do you remember your radicalization?

A friend of mine was shot and killed in a drive by. Another friend became a gang member and surely was on the shooting end in some engagements before he too died by bullet. I too spent some time in a gang at a young age. It was basically a route to having close allies, to having a team who had your back and vice versa. It was also a path to some financial well being. In these ways it made sense. If you live in a condition of exclusion from the broad society, then you take your talents where you can best put them to use—and that meant joining a gang.

So, after my friend died I was uneasy. But it wasn’t yet enough to break me out of my then life path which seemed to me my only possible life path. But visiting friends in prison and hearing stories of their arrests and prosecution began to eat at me. II went to court a few times, and I just watched. It was horrifying. Then I got arrested, wrongly, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. Because it wasn’t bitterness or anger at the wrongful incarceration, that was overturned in time that drove me to political awareness. It was like the flesh-eating disease, except it was eating my mind with the reality that prison was a school for crime. Prison literally taught crime. Prison had little or often nothing to do with reducing injustice. Prison was an industry overwhelmingly about control and profit. The roles it imposed bent the people inside, inmates and employees, whatever their inclinations may have otherwise been.

The combination of my horror at the legal system and my overall sensitivity to racism in all aspects of life, opened me to trying to better understand my lot and society. I could accept my lot as a criminal and make the best of it—or I could reject my lot as a criminal and find a different road. I rejected and ran from crime to activism.

And from that point on, the rest was running downhill. I discovered I had a talent for explaining, hearing, and relating to others. Being an organizer, public speaker, and activist came naturally. I put my new talents to use where they could do most good.

You were very active in early work around prisons, do you see these matters like Robin?

Yes, broadly, but with my own tilt. When I went to prison I was arrested on trumped up charges and my incarceration was overturned after I served a few years. So I was obviously familiar, first hand, with that kind of insanely vile injustice—the incarceration of innocence—which, I should say, isn’t always a matter of trumped up charges, but is often due to bureaucratic pressure, racism, and laws that punish victimless “crimes” with prison terms.

But the truth was, on entering prison I didn’t have a good idea what to expect. My knowledge was limited to TV and movie images and a few discussions. I realized, in time, that plenty of inmates were innocent, tons were-over sentenced, and even for people guilty of serious criminal acts against other people, most were tutored by prison not into become potentially better citizens, but to become more callous and effective criminals.

[Narrator — If Harvard, Oxford, and so on are finishing schools for masters of the universe designed to provide their graduates needed connections with others and modes of speaking, ways to carry oneself, familiarity with wealth and power, and so on, then in roughly the same sense, it seems prisons became in RPS thinking finishing schools for crime, conveying connections, cultural styles, and methods for after release—or even for while incarcerated.]

Peter continues…

So I saw injustice and horribly harsh mistreatment of the innocent and near innocent, but I also saw an insane and unnecessary transformation of many inmates into what they had not been before, that is, into incorrigible sadistic lifetime criminals.

My initial preoccupation was survival. I had to learn how to get by, how to relate, how to navigate a foreign world. I had to gain friends who I could relate to, keep sane with, and work with. Next came modest attempts to build our numbers. We began to share texts which came from RPS. We began writing to other prisoners in other prisons about our experiences and reading about and discussing theirs.

By 2028 we were ready to make some noise. We didn’t have much idea what it could achieve, though we knew what we wanted. So we called a one day strike. Turnout was enormous. Prison labor is effectively slave labor. You work at command, constantly anticipating violent repression. You get back for your efforts bare subsistence. Your every breath is overseen.

While our one day strike was for demands about prison relations, in the following week, celebrating our scale, we thought, wait a minute, we work at command. We anticipate repression. We earn subsistence. Our every breath is overseen. Why not strike for a living wage? Why not strike to participate in the decisions that affect us? Why not strike to improve our current lives? Why not strike to win changes to prepare us for outside by developing citizen-needed habits?

We began to challenge the behavior of our guards and the rules for visiting and for our having books and internet access. We demanded our own classes and sought good wages, conditions, and other rights. It wasn’t easy talking with inmates whose mindsets were understandably cautious, hostile, and often violent. It wasn’t easy diminishing racial hostility.

So that was the grounds on which we then began a more sustained prison work strike and that strike, as everyone knows, spread quickly from prison to prison and the support from without was enormous. Repression, as per our plans, was made ineffective. It wasn’t that the guards couldn’t brutalize us into temporary submission. They could, and they did, often. But we didn’t fight back. And that not only won us tremendous support from outside, but also limited the violence we had to endure.

We would back off, seemingly lose, and within days be back on strike, just as we had been before. I don’t know if it had an effect, but the night before the first strike the prison movie had been Cool Hand Luke. That was a big mistake. Like Luke, a prison favorite, we got knocked down but we got back up, over and over. We took Luke one better. We didn’t individually heroically escape our hell only to be repeatedly hauled back. We collectively repeatedly attacked our hell so in the end there would be no hell to haul anyone back to.

Miguel turns back to or at any rate here includes content from Robin…

Robin, how would you sum up the changes in courts and police…

Not yet having a full vision for adjudication and legality in a new society hasn’t overly impedes judicially related activism. There was much we knew to be worthy and headed in the right direction, even as RPS first got started.

Of course, the impact of these efforts has been enormous where changes have been won and implemented, not least in a huge reduction of inmates and the transformation of conditions for those still incarcerated, but how much beyond these changes may be needed is still unclear.

A major proposal, for example, that some have been exploring is that aside from eliminating incarceration for victimless crimes and other changes that reduce the duration of isolation from society, perhaps those who have committed violent crimes and are deemed a danger to society and who therefore really do need to be separated from it, ought to have, ironically, something like their own societies in which to rehabilitate and become socially responsible.

I suppose it is the penal colony idea of old, but without the deprivations and fierce oversight. Perhaps small islands, instead of massive concrete towns, could host communities that mirror the best social relations we can conceive for any community. Maybe this should become the default home for prisoners until they are deemed ready to return to broader society. Maybe more stringent and less rehabilitative options should be applied only when they prove essential for other inmates’ safety.

[Narrator — Is this too strange for words, or is it a plausible path? Can you see why at least my reaction to Miguel’s oral history is that specific choices aren’t the essence. Underlying thoughts, feelings, and broad inclinations are?]

In any event, Robin continued….

These are not easy issues to deal with because some people are prosecuted and quite plausibly able to rehabilitate, whereas other people are simply incorrigible and will try to exploit any opportunity to take advantage of others. Of course we don’t want incarceration that produces anti-social mindsets that aren’t present in the first place, but nor do we want incarceration that a subset of inmates violate at the expense of the rest.

In any case, the upheavals within prisons, in communities that have many prisoners, and in the legal professions that were nurtured by RPS in its early days persist right into the present and will likely continue for a considerable time to come before we settle on fully transformed relations.

Robin, I would like to ask you a personal question, if you don’t mind. As a criminal trial lawyer, in your younger years did you ever defend people accused of murder in a state with the death penalty? How did you feel in such a situation? And, on the flip side, did you ever knowingly get people who were guilty entirely off from punishment? How did you feel about that?

Yes, to both. On the former, I did about 15 murder trials with a death penalty possible. I was loath to take such cases for the reasons your question anticipates. It is difficult enough to defend someone against vicious incarceration penalties. It is unbearable to go to a trial, day after day, knowing that if you lose, your client, who in many cases you become quite friendly and even close with, will be executed. For that reason I didn’t do such cases unless I had confidence the client was actually innocent. Still, I lost three. Later two were freed when new evidence proved their innocence. One was nearing execution when we won an end to the death penalty. He will still be languishing in jail when we totally reform the prison system and, in my estimation, win his release.

Winning freedom for someone who you think or even know to be guilty has, as you anticipate, an opposite kind of emotional drag on a lawyer. For myself, accomplishing that for modest crimes, I always felt nothing but good. The penalties would have achieved nothing and in any event far exceeded anything warranted, so I celebrated freeing folks from that.

There were, however, other cases where I won a client freedom and he was guilty of a serious crime, in one case murder. This was severely trying for me, as I am sure it was for the families of the victim. What if such a freed person killed again? And this is why fixing the justice system is no simple matter. I hated that case, and yet, I would do it again, so long as we have the system we now endure.

The closest we can come to just outcomes with this system entails lawyers doing their best, always, even when our best in some sense proves to be too good. The sum up of all this may be simple. The U.S. claims to have a system of laws. But laws are a means, justice should be the goal. So, when laws even really good ones that are well conceived and carefully implemented trample justice, justice should trump law.

Media Madness

Miguel includes a new focus at this point with a new interviewee, Leslie Zinn…

Leslie Zinn, you were an accomplished media personality on both TV and radio, you are famous for resisting incursions on free speech. You advanced RPS policy and analysis not only about media, but in all matters, repeatedly ably using your shows for the purpose. Do you remember what got you into media and journalism, and being radical?

My story is a bit humdrum. In school I was adrift and then I took a journalism course and the professor was exciting and inspiring so I took another. At the same time, I enjoyed technology and got into video. It turned out I wasn’t bad on camera so I did some video commentaries for fun, and soon it became much more.

On how I became radical, honestly, that too was humdrum. My home life was very progressive. So when I started writing for the campus newspaper in my junior and senior years in college, I was already covering overwhelmingly progressive and radical affairs. I was radical, even revolutionary by age 23 or so. I knew there was no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. At 30, I was on radio with my own show, and covering the economic meltdown and its aftermath. That lead to my interest in RPS and lifelong commitment to its advance.

I have been asking folks to recount a particularly personal moving or inspiring episode from the period of the rise of RPS. Could you do that for us, as well?

There were so many. Within RPS I would say the formation of Journalists for Social Responsibility, but if I have to choose one experience that is more personal, then from the very early days, from before RPS was ever mentioned, but from a time when what would become RPS was gestating, there were the massive women’s demonstrations all around the U.S. and the world. It wasn’t just attending that was so meaningful for me. It wasn’t even just seeing the numbers, the slogans, the energy. It wasn’t even just hearing about the events across the country. Or hearing, in days to follow, personal stories of people marching anew, after long hiatus, or marching for the first time.

It was two other things. First, back then I got in a conversation with a couple of Trump supporters. It was more interesting and informative than most other conversations I had because they weren’t what I expected. They were caring thinking folks. They were blasted by their circumstances. They took for granted the plight of many others, saw no end to it, but were hopeful that perhaps Trump would so upend things and was enough aware of their pains that something good would emerge. They were wrong about that, of course, but far from dumb, ignorant, or uncaring. They actually understood much about how crass and venal society was that many on the left didn’t fully get. And they listened which, sadly, many of all views did too little of.

The other added impact of those times was that I saw that the gigantic outpouring wouldn’t immediately overthrow Trump or reverse Trumpism, much less immediately transform into a positive movement aimed way beyond mere liberalism, which was, in fact, preponderant at the events. I knew achieving all that and more was going to require tremendous effort. And I began to feel in a much deeper and I guess less academic way the extent to which actually winning a new world required winning over citizens of the existing world, which meant hearing them, respecting them, and relating to their concerns.

I knew that sometimes gargantuan outpourings did lead to more activism, but other times not. And I felt this pressure, this responsibility, this mandate for future children, to work for success. To somehow help this emerging resistance to Trumpian reaction to become a movement for positive change extending way beyond beating Trump, way beyond getting liberals back in office, way beyond business as usual. As RPS emerged, my joining was a natural act, already made inevitable.

An obvious factor in social change is communications, including having our own media as well as impacting the mainstream. How did these aspects develop in the early days of RPS?

This is an area where pre-RPS we had plenty of good ideas and desires. Mainstream media was understood to be a corporate cabal supporting corporate continuity. It sold audience to advertisers. It highly constrained its content to keep its audience amenable to being commercially exploited. Alternative media, in contrast and at its best, provided audiences information and thoughtful assessments able to inform efforts at change.

RPS solidified that kind of critical awareness and simultaneously legitimated skeptical attitudes to mainstream media, but we also challenged alternative media. We didn’t say, no, don’t pursue your agenda. Instead we said, wait a minute. Your agenda is good. Your vehicle needs a major tune up.

RPS said, if alternative media is really going to deliver alternative information, analysis, and vision, it needs to embrace alternative structure. It won’t optimally provide activist information if its daily operations implicitly ratify society’s guiding norms.

Of course, alternative media understood that its roles and methods should not mimic the racist and sexist hierarchies of society. It understood that it should not be owned by some person or persons who pulled strings which tethered everyone. But it didn’t understand the implications of mimicking the corporate division of labor common to all mainstream institutions, or of blindly accepting the logic of market allocation as does mainstream media and the whole economy.

RPS pushed these two additional advisories about how alternative media ought to become better, and alternative media, though initially resistant, steadily changed.

What did the changes look like? How were they implemented? Did they matter for alternative media’s product?

Basically, alternative media added to its internal guidelines that not only should it not have men and women, or blacks and whites doing systematically different types of work and having systematically different benefits and influence, but, as well, the same should hold for class difference. This meant eliminating the old corporate division of labor and instituting what RPS came to call balanced job complexes. Indeed, alternative media institutions may well have been the first workplaces which systematically undertook this.

It wasn’t easy. In a society that has a coordinator class and a working class, people enter the workforce prepared and expecting to be in one or the other. Their upbringing, schooling, living conditions, and the general culture they experience acclimates them, one and all, to fit existing roles without resisting.

[I interject…here is that theme yet again. People bent out of what would otherwise have been much better shapes. Does the way these RPSers keep featuring it seem to overly reduce humans to passivity? Or does it make clear the potential for agency and change, albeit also the obstacles?]

Leslie continues…

Consider an alternative media institution of twenty people. Odds are before the transformations, the institution’s workforce was class divided. Some employees were empowered and made decisions. The rest were disempowered and carried out instructions. The big step to achieve change was clear. We had to reapportion roles among jobs so that every set of tasks and responsibilities that someone at the institution had as his or her overall job was comparably empowering as every other job. Only this could maintain venues and procedures that would facilitate collective self management. Only attaining balanced jobs and collective self management could in turn remove the structural basis for internal class division. And only by not being defensive about internal class division could the organization see clearly to properly address class relations out in society.

But Leslie, what about the fact that people’s expectations, confidence levels, and comfort as well as their skill levels, knowledge, and contacts all appeared suited to their past roles and unsuited to the proposed changed roles? What about the complaint that if those used to making the decisions and doing the empowering tasks did less of that, and more that is rote, the operation would suffer and even collapse?

Once RPS insights and pressures were active, you are right that we had a conflict. Some said we should restructure because it is right and once we are done, we will be better able to fulfill our media responsibilities. Do it.

Others said, wait a minute, the shift itself will be disastrous. It may seek a worthy goal but it will so reduce our current ability and the quality of our present product that we will never get better. Don’t do it.

Yes, those in the latter camp had a view that would preserve their advantages, but they said that wasn’t what was driving them. The greater good was driving them. What to make of that? Basically, it wasn’t easy, but change did come. For one thing, it was discovered that training and support went a long way. The transition from being ill prepared to being sufficiently competent to being powerfully excellent didn’t take as long as its critics feared. What the more highly educated folks had been doing was for the most part quite attainable by less highly educated folks. The biggest obstacle was confidence, willingness, and sufficient practice.

In some organizations the transition occurred by prior empowered workers doing a better mix of tasks, and accepting, on top of that, responsibility for training others. This addition to their workload was considered fair since for so long they had been advantaged. For a time, they could do disproportionately more, rather than less, work.

Other organizations, initiated a period of internal oversight of work, sort of like when you bring a new person aboard and you watch to make sure they are competent before giving them similar freedom of action as long-term employees.

In any case, it wasn’t unduly long before alternative media institutions had workers who each and all were highly knowledgable about the policies, methods, and agendas of their whole operation. Self management began to involve all workers and to generate excellent outcomes as well as good feelings.

The switch, once we understood its many dimensions, didn’t require someone who was uninterested, unsuited, or who hated drawing, to draw book covers. It didn’t require someone deficient at or who hated doing calculations to keep financial records. Rather, people would choose a job composed of tasks that they could do well, which tasks, however, taken in combination, were comparably empowering to the combination of tasks other people did.

One person didn’t do only finances, thereby enjoying a monopoly on knowledge critical to all decisions. One person didn’t do only editorial, thereby only determining substance and creating empowering connections to writers. For each type of activity in the operation, for every area of work, various people participated. No one did overwhelmingly much less only rote and obedient tasks. No one had no connection to determining outcomes.

And it wasn’t long before having just a few people in charge with the rest overseen was frowned on just as much as was having women cleaning up and doing nothing else, or having Latinos packing boxes and doing nothing else, was frowned on.

The impact on alternative media was to unleash the creativity and energy of previously subordinate participants, yielding more quality. People didn’t just do precisely what was required and go home. People did what they were supposed to do, yes, but also thought about that they were doing and how to do better. People went from working to rule, to working creatively.

The organization no longer had a decision-dominating group who accepted the idea of coordinator class rule. This in turn meant suddenly this class dynamic could be openly addressed. A whole new dimension of topical attention arose from revamped alternative media. Just as, decades earlier, women and blacks fighting against being subordinated led to improvements in alternative media coverage of gender and race, so too now for class, working class people fighting against being subordinated led to improvements in alternative media coverage of not only workplace organization but also class relations in society.

Another innovation was rejection of markets. This was more subtle but once alternative media began to regard market allocation with the same level of rejection as, say, they rejected political dictatorship, they began to question the aspects of their own behavior that were market driven. This, in turn, led to exploring ways of alternative media operations collectively working together rather than competitively seeking donor support and audience only for self and not for others.

What about campaigns addressed at mainstream media?

Among leftists, this was less controversial, but still involved some major change. Before RPS, we had excellent analysis of media machinations. People understood mainstream media’s horrible faults including those stemming from its corporate structure and its societal role. Still, there was little challenge other than to register complaints and write condemnations.

RPS early on said, wait a minute. If it is right for people seeking change to fight against wars and global warming and to combat racist policing—seeking not just to ultimately end the injustices, but, in the shorter term to win gains moving toward that long-term aim—then why isn’t the same true for media? It is great that we form our own alternative media and we should continue doing so both for the immediate information benefits and to show by example that better is possible. But shouldn’t we also pressure mainstream media?

And so there emerged sustained opposition to mainstream media. We went beyond analyzing and criticizing mainstream media to demanding changes and fighting for them.

One wing of this campaign challenged mainstream payment procedures, salaries, and decision methods, seeking changes moving toward RPS aims. A second wing demanded new sections of coverage elevating community and dissident voices. It also sought oversight of manipulations, including retractions and accountability, and in time even sought financial transfers from mainstream to grassroots efforts.

Media was an area where RPS moved quickly. We had high comprehension in many constituencies. We could build better institutions and our incentives to do so were great because media’s impact on society and on radical prospects was huge.

What do you think were the key early events in moving toward new media?

I think much had happened earlier, but in the first few years after the first convention four steps stood out.

First, we created Journalists for Social Responsibility. This took on mainstream norms and institutions with diverse campaigns of the sort noted above. It caught on in journalism schools, as well.

Second, we created Press the Press, a broad popular movement to demand changes in mainstream media. This coordinated with, supported, and sometimes also pushed Journalists for Social Responsibility.

Third, we pursued workplace organizing inside alternative and mainstream media as well, and built linkages between the two which greatly aided each.

Fourth, we urged alternative media projects to be mutually supportive rather than destructively competitive regarding everything from fund raising to coordinating news and opinion coverage.

Miguel now turned to Lydia Luxembourg…

Lydia, RPS shied away from direct ties with alternative media, but actively sought support from it and submitted content to it. RPS also helped with mainstream media battles. Was the RPS approach optimal?

Nothing in society and human relations is ever optimal, but a wise idea guided the RPS choice, and it worked out fine.

The thinking was, if RPS made direct connections with specific alternative media, including bringing those media under RPS auspices, ultimately, that media would lose independence. Whatever we might prefer, the pressure to praise RPS and to repress criticism of RPS, even if the latter was only implicit or benignly motivated, would have adverse effects.

[I interject, you didn’t need to bring up state run media like Pravda to make this case, though it would have been relevant. Party newspapers were similarly instructive about the tendency.]

Lydia continued…

Now you might think, sure, but so what? If RPS has media that it is staffing and financially supporting, but other alternative media exist as well, won’t the latter provide a counter pressure so the effect on narrowing alternative media agendas of RPS allegiance is overcome by other alternative media?

The answer is yes, that was conceivable. But it was also conceivable that as RPS grew, its media would become steadily more robust and secure, and other alternative media would lack in comparison. The former would grow. The latter would shrink. By the time society transformed, we might have a single organization dominant in the world of communications and information. So our thinking was, if we don’t want that, then why take a path that could potentially, even with no ill intent by each participant, lead toward that? 

[Narrator — When you read their testimony do you feel, like I feel, that we need more of that. More of long-run aims impacting short-run choices?]

Lydia continues…So RPS decided to send content, seek support, help with battles against mainstream media, and even provide funds for all alternative media to share, but not to become institutionally entwined with specific alternative media. That approach helped generate fiscally secure media of incredible diversity beholden to no organizational sponsor.

How did the fiscal security come about?

Do you mind if I note, Miguel, that it feels strange you are so often asking questions you have contributed answers to from your own experience? Well, in any case as you know, mainstream media operates on a commercial model of selling audience to advertisers. For alternative media to do that—though some did try, at times—was antithetical to our overall agenda. You couldn’t fully serve fiscally poor audiences when your logic of existence was to attract viewers with disposable income. You couldn’t fully provide honest and needed information and vision when your logic of existence required that the audience you dangled before advertisers should be ready to buy products rather than being made disgruntled, angry, depressed, or actively hostile to commercialism, ads, and corporate logos and machinations by your content. You couldn’t sustain insightful attitudes toward market driven commercialism when you were constantly commercially market driven.

But Miguel, you may wonder, or well, again I know you are familiar with all this, but some of your readers may wonder, if we refused ads, how would we pay our bills? While that difficulty had existed for decades, the internet worsened the situation in many respects. The prior solution had been to seek listener, viewer, and reader support, or sometimes foundation support, all in the form of donations as well as, of course, to get revenue from informed purchases of books, magazines, and the like. If you weren’t soliciting companies to give you ad revenue, then you had to get revenue from your audience. In at least one way, however, the internet made this harder, by establishing the view among its users, more than ever before, that information should be free.

People would visit sites that had ads all over and think, how great, I don’t have to buy the information and therefore there is no cost. They ignored that the price of what they bought all over society included the cost of the ads, and that access to them was being sold to advertisers, which, with a different spin, should have been understood to be a major personal and social violation.

Then the same people would visit alternative media sites. Whereas before the rise of the idea that all information should be free, appeals for donations seemed reasonable, now, for many—not all—such appeals seemed annoying. Why should I give anything when I can get whatever information I want free from other sites? Why should I get a print subscription, say, or buy a book? Why should I donate? It mostly wasn’t as overt as the questions suggest. It was mostly more subtle, a kind of meme-like diffusion of resistance to paying. But in response alternative media had to become even more perpetually and aggressively even apocalyptically fund-seeking than in its past.

Alternative media at first seemed to grow with the internet, but it undeniably also suffered major losses. And the losses weren’t only financial and in having to become fixated, sort of like political candidates, on fund raising. Another set of problems had to do with content and scope. The internet, and in particular Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and their variants and successors, tended to acclimate people to short content. This in turn wrecked havoc with people’s attention spans and content expectations. When you get used to short, you seek short. Long starts to feel onerous, even oppressive.

Eventually, even alternative media drifted toward a short is beautiful orientation, partly desperately trying to preserve audience, but in time extolling and advancing the ethos of short, shorter, shortest as if this trend owed to some positive logic rather than to the dictates and impact of ad-driven commercialism. And then there was clickbait, part and parcel of manipulation or, less delicately put, fraudulent lying. Before long everyone is creating misleading and then outright deceptive titles. A subset of users get frustrated and turn off to information providers. Another subset becomes addicted to passing time with clickable content before they become disgusted with insubstantial content.

But you asked about how the fiscal security came about and I am getting off track. The answer is RPS argued with all who would hear—both in its membership and beyond—that alternative media was a public good and should be financed by collective support from the whole community. It should be like public education. Each item should be free to the person using it and to that end the project as a whole should be funded by the community’s largesse. RPS argued that separate alternative media institutions shouldn’t compete with each other for donor support which in time led to partial participatory planning inside left media.

The whole progressive community put up funds needed, which were in turn dispersed among alternative media projects in accord with their delivery of socially desirable output. Since the broader society should also contribute, RPS initiated a campaign for government support of dissident media, and for the spoils of popular support to also be collectively shared.

RPS brokered meetings of alternative media operations to form an alternative media industry council…and it urged the community of users to interactively and cooperatively negotiate the output of alternative media. The idea was that various projects would propose what they wanted to do, and what it would cost, and the sum of all that from each of its participants for each new year was what the whole alternative media industry wanted to do. This would be made known to those who use alternative media and the involved community would make known their reaction, and how much they would provide. And it would go back and forth a bit. And there would be an agreement, and thereafter, for that year, each independent operation would have a budget to pursue its own efforts. All alternative media operations who subscribed to this had to forego individual fund raising, or, if they had contacts they wanted to pursue, had to report doing so and allot the donations to the collective bounty. Different projects had different budgets because of having different agendas that required more or less staff and resources, but not because they knew wealthier donors or won fund raising competitions.

So was it like a mini instance of cooperative planning…

Yes, Miguel, in a way, but of course half a bridge is often very hard, or even impossible, to cross. So while it revealed much about such planning, it wasn’t a full test because it was so partial. Nonetheless, it freed up valuable time that had been going to endless alienating, self-seeking, fund raising and it caused alternative media groups to see one another as partners rather than competitors, which yielded more synergistic work. It was a major achievement for RPS, yet RPS itself got from it only the same benefit as everyone else, greater stability, more solidarity, and better communication.

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