In which Robin Kuntsler, Celia Curie, Ali Carmichael, Lydia Luxemburg, Andre Goldman, Peter Cabral, and Alexandra Voline address differences over tactics in RPS development and activism.

[Author’s Note: This is the eleventh 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. 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.]

Leadership

Robin, in addition to dealing with differences in background of members, there is also, of course, dealing with differences in views members have. One of the contentious issues in RPS has been the question of leadership. As RPS’s first Shadow Supreme Court Justice, you likely have views on this. Why was it contentious?

Typically, one or a few people go first in any endeavor. They lead. Others see their example, hear it, assess it, and if they follow, there has been an act of leadership. No one in their right mind thinks that is a bad thing.

Rosa Parks not going to the back of the bus is not a bad thing. Your neighbor being first in the community to call a meeting about a nasty, dangerous intersection that needs a new stoplight is not a bad thing. Bernie Sanders initiating a campaign for President is not a bad thing.

Indeed, everyone agrees that that aspect of leadership is a good and inevitable fact of life. We are not a hive species that has one mind which always operates in unison. It is good when someone provides exemplary behavior or ideas which resonate with others.

What is bad is when someone who goes first and provides leadership accrues excessive power and wealth and becomes personally perversely distorted. We all know instances.

Take the second problem first. You provide leadership. How do you view your own act? Let’s say it isn’t just once. Instead, you often have ideas or undertake steps that others later emulate. Do you consider yourself superior, more deserving, and more important? Do you tend to look down on other folks? Do you ignore other peoples’ views? Do you feel that only your views matter? Call this ego inflation. It distorts personality and bends behavior. It is a slippery slope all the way to egregious elitism. It underlies the oft repeated but rarely understood claim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What about wealth and power? That leadership garners praise and respect is appropriate. Good job! However, if the praise and respect gets parlayed into control over positions of great influence, and then that increased influence yields power and wealth, well, that is inappropriate. Arriving at a worthy idea or practice before others shouldn’t convey increased income or greater say in outcomes. Even worse, it should not create conditions for a repeat performance and another, and another, leading to entrenched power and wealth.

Those are the potential problems of entrenched leadership. Sometimes people would discuss them in a vague way that would confuse the issues but, before long, everyone in RPS agreed what was at stake. The contentious part was how we would deal with it.

Okay, what were the contending views for how to deal, and what emerged as the best solution to avoid the potential pitfalls of leadership?

We debated how to benefit from some people arriving at good choices and other people then supporting them without incurring costs in the personalities of those leading, or, even worse, in the whole social structure due to entrenching leadership which would then become preoccupied with protecting its position and alienated from the rest of the population.

The RPS solution on the personal side, in the minds of the people who sometimes lead, was to try to change the self perception that goes with leadership.

In everyone’s mind the definition of providing leadership had to become to step out first in ideas or behavior, but to do so in ways that welcome others to do the same. The best leader causes others to lead too. Positive leadership precedes others but then elevates them. Positive leadership recognizes, reiterates, and never forgets that to lead means to provide without taking, to give without receiving.

We wanted self management. We wanted social roles that did not aggrandize anyone on the basis of his or her having had good ideas or having done something admirable. But to get both, we had to escape a viscous circle. Old consciousness plus recurrent leadership from a few people inexorably propelled divisive hierarchy. We could see it everywhere. Until new institutions were firmly in place, exerting leadership tended to reinstall past relations. Yet attaining new institutions required acts of leadership. Was this a deadly Catch-22?

One answer was to curtail leadership recurring. In other words, if someone has some combination of attributes that causes that person to repeatedly arrive at good ideas or good choices earlier than others, to avoid that person’s inexorable elevation we could note the tendency and temporarily preclude that person from being able to continually exert leadership. We would lose some good contributions from that person, but we would prevent that person’s trajectory from interfering with still more important gains.

The second answer was to say no, we should get all the benefits such a person can provide, we just have to be really diligent about preventing the person from becoming elitist and, even more so, about preventing his or her turning popular respect into entrenched influence.

Where did you come down in this dispute?

I hope you won’t feel it is dodging the question, but I thought both sides were right and so a judicious mix was needed. My criteria for a good mix was that we should not let one person’s creativity, innovation, courage, or whatever it might be, crowd out the possibility of others rising in their creativity, innovation, courage, or whatever it might be. This was, in some sense, just applying the earlier idea about the personal solution more explicitly and carefully.

I once worked with a group of twenty people. Three were very creative, thoughtful, courageous, or whatever, compared to the rest. Why? Who knows? Perhaps a kink in their genes or their upbringing.  Different experiences. Whatever, they very often jumped ahead to excellent solutions for each issue that arose. Everyone else was crowded out from contributing the similar leadership by the three peoples’ speed. Each time the three people excelled, they became more confident and more practiced at it. Others became acclimated to hearing answers and not providing them. Entrenchment occurred. Even with balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration, and self management, this was a trajectory that let some folks get a jump in the leadership process where the jump in turn afforded them a higher likelihood of leading next time too, and next time, and so on. It may not be malicious or greedy per se, but it can be damaging nonetheless.

As we began to understand that dynamic and we also understood that even at the risk of arriving at good ideas or actions later than we might otherwise have done, we would have to reign in folks who were recurrently leading so that others might fill the space. Of course those early leaders, if they had adopted the mindset that true leadership firstly elevates others, would not mind and would even welcome the restraint—but even if they did not welcome it, even if they endlessly argued that they were being stifled, or that the whole group was losing out on their genius, still the steps would sometimes need to be taken.

I should say, this is of course quite delicate. It can be done in a ham-handed way that really does stifle creativity and initiative or it can be done well and increase both overall creativity and initiative and at the same time approach classlessness, which is the goal. The thing is, as with most things social, when you get into a specific situation there will be differences of opinion and no easy way to arrive at resolution. But we did notice one thing relevant to how to proceed.

Take that twenty person group, again. Suppose two are leading, Let’s say it is Jack and Jill, repeatedly. We notice. We suggest that they hang back, be quiet, wait on others to arrive at the leading insight or at a better one. An argument ensues. Jack and Jill protest that they would be hampered, restrained, even oppressed by this choice. Our leadership is for the good, they say. Don’t stifle us.

This happened often and similarities appeared. First, it was for those other than Jack and Jill to assess the value of Jack and Jill’s contributions, not for Jack and Jill to do so. Perhaps they weren’t as excellent as they thought. Second, Jack and Jill were not being hampered, restrained, or even repressed. They were being told, hold on, use your every last bit of insight, creativity, and courage, but use it to mentor, train, spur on, and otherwise add to the likelihood that others will not just arrive where you would have proposed, but even arrive at better places than that. Lead by creating more leadership. This was a good way to pursue diversified leadership, to prevent entrenching leaders, and to avoid resentments. Once people became good at this, most of the tensions and dangers associated with diversifying leadership largely dissipated.

Did you follow the pattern when you were chosen to be Supreme Court Judge in the Shadow Government?

My post, mimicking the actual U.S. Government, was at first stated to be a lifetime appointment—which is of course totally contrary to everything I have been saying. I did feel the allure of it. I cannot deny that. I would reply when asked about it, that of course there will be no such post in a real, new, participatory government, and if you take a look at my writings and speeches about the judicial system, I hope you will agree that the overall values regarding leadership have been forefront. But I think my stance may have in time evaporated in lordly rationalizations except that we shortly redefined how our Shadow Government operated, with us employing limited terms and recall, as well as balanced job complexes for everyone, including Supreme Court judges.

Pace of Change

Celia, I guess part and parcel of the above, another issue that recurs often is what is the appropriate pace of change? How have you understood that?

In some ways it is the same issue. Do we want to advance on some criteria, like size, or militancy, or whatever, as much possible, as fast as possible, and then bring along as many other people as possible? Or do we want to elicit the broadest possible advance, and move forward together as much as possible?

Can maximum immediate advance by a few bring all others along? Or will maximum immediate gain by a few run so far out in front that others are left behind while those leading become isolated and vulnerable? Does carefully moving forward with as many as possible prevent backsliding and ultimately propel everyone further?

I think there is no one right answer to fit all situations. Let me give you one example that perhaps highlights the issues. Some regions move faster for whatever reasons, than others. So, when there was a growing labor movement in Cleveland seeking not only a higher minimum wage, better conditions, and a shorter work week well before efforts attained similar strength most other places in the country—back when RPS was first developing—Cleveland’s workers came up against just this issue. Some said, “let’s just go all out. Let’s occupy factories, disrupt downtown. Fight to win. We will lose, sure, for now. We won’t have enough support to prevent national guard repression, nor to sustain ourselves, and we will have to back down. But the rest of the country will see our uprising. Our aggressiveness will inspire others. It will spread. We won’t win now, that is true, but by moving fast we will contribute greatly to winning later.”

Others said, “Hold on. Others in the country will see us lose. Is that going to inspire them to emulate us? More, here in Cleveland, if we follow that path, after we get repressed and lose, what will we have achieved? We will have taken our growing movement and trashed it by our own choice. Instead, why not keep building and send out emissaries to other towns and cities to explain how we have proceeded and how they can do likewise, and how, if we all grow, we will all together win? Instead of now occupying factories and causing repression and losing, why not keep on building our chapters in the factories, and propose how we would operate the factories, and support counter institutions outside them, as well, and run campaigns that seek attainable changes while preparing ourselves to seek more until we have sufficient support here in Cleveland, and elsewhere as well, to take over workplaces? Faster pace that leads backward is not better than slower pace that leads forward.”

Did RPS offer anything useful by way of dealing with this issue?

RPS generated an overall mindset of winning a new society, not merely posturing in the moment. Also, the tremendous emphasis in RPS on trying different approaches and on keeping them all operational often allowed compromise. Not always, but sometimes you could partly try fast pace, partly try slower pace, test each, and then pour more effort into whatever worked better. This was ideal when people arguing for each approach did not want to be right to be able to brag about having been right or to win the argument and be a winner, but wanted to follow the best path, whatever it turned out to be and whatever their role in it needed to be.

Can you give some instances of these possibilities?

Well, Cleveland took the patient approach. Boston/Cambridge had a similar choice, but it was earlier and more about campus activism. There are lots of schools in Boston/Cambridge and the student movement grew there very rapidity and earlier than in most of the rest of the country. This wasn’t much different than earlier in the Sixties. So it too confronted a choice. Should we students go as quick as we can, so to speak, escalating and getting repressed before we had sufficient really mass support to beat back the repression, but as a model of what might happen aimed to spur others on? Or should we go slower, develop more of a base, far less visibly to others elsewhere, but more sustained and, one would hope, with better results. And in fact we did find a way to try both approaches, at least to a degree.

Most of the campuses embarked on a slower approach of building organizations and reaching out to local communities. At the same time, as you know MIT and Boston University had massive occupations and confrontations. The mix turned out rather well. Other students on other campuses supported the militant events, but simultaneously urged those involved to relate to the longer term efforts in return. The militant events caught the eyes of the nation, as intended, but the parallel endeavors also got visibility and were the lasting legacy, I guess you might say.

Another example, at least in my view, was the way many demonstrations adopted a multi tactic approach. A massive march would have, the day after it was held, a big civil disobedience event. Each would give strength and added meaning to the other. But, as well, it meant one could participate as one preferred, rather than either be involved or not be involved. There were, in the old phrase, different strokes for different folks. Strikes and boycotts developed diverse ways of relating too. So did things like big teach-ins and accompanying demonstrations or sit-ins.

I have been asking folks, and I forgot to do so with you earlier, to perhaps recount an event or campaign or situation during the rise of RPS that was particularly important or inspiring for them. Could you do that too, now?

You said personally, and I think by that you mean something a bit more idiosyncratic to my own involvements, and for that I think I was moved beyond measure by one campaign in particular. The national prisoners strike of 2034.

You know, one feeling about prisoners is, well, they are captured. There is not much point organizing folks who have already been taken away. But another feeling is not only much more humane, but also more strategic. These are victims of injustice. They are why we revolt. They are who revolts. It just takes effort and clarity to see it, and the prisoners’ campaign brought that. 

It was an accident of circumstance that I happened to be visiting one of the prisons, with a kind of artistic show, while it was occupied. There was no way to leave, and I like to think I would not have left even if I could have, but I don’t know. The fear of a rerun of Attica—a long past site of prison struggle and massacre—was palpable, and I was certainly scared. But the scale of external support, and of wavering by the guards, precluded anything like that. Still, it felt imminent, over and over, and yet the prisoners carried on. Their courage was incredible.

Solidarity with Autonomy

Ali, another area of potentially serious differences had to do with issues of solidarity and their implications for being true to one’s views. Can you tell us the form of this issue?

Solidarity means acting in accord with the interests of others, and supporting others in their pursuits. Autonomy means functioning without intrusion from without. Clearly you shouldn’t always support but nor should you always ignore others’ wishes. So the question was, what mindset and choices have the best chance of coming up with a desirable mix.

The situation arises in many forms, but here is the one that was most pivotal to the emergence of RPS. Consider a movement against racism or sexism. It certainly doesn’t want to be subject to the will of racists/sexists, nor even to the will of well meaning people in the dominant community who are, however, insufficiently aware of the dynamics of racism/sexism. It wants to be more autonomous than that. It wants to explore its own views, pursue its own agenda, learn from its own mistakes, and benefit from its own insights. Over fifty years before RPS was even born this wisdom was encapsulated in the idea of what was called the autonomous women’s movement including efforts like Bread and Roses in Massachusetts and various anti racist efforts beginning with what was called Black Power and including groups like the Black Panthers and the Latin Young Lords.

Women and Blacks were sick of men or whites determining their agendas. Sick, even, of having to constantly argue with men or whites, rather than developing as they themselves saw fit without having to continually expend excessive time and energy dealing with male or white complaints. And for that reason the idea of autonomy arose. The women’s movement and the Black power movement were autonomous, meaning they operated under their own control and pretty much unconnected to other aggregations of non female, non black people.

That was fine in theory, and to a point, but it had an associated operational problem. Such a movement could lose a lot in terms of ties to and solidarity from and toward others. With that in mind, some would say, why diminish our overall power with this autonomy stuff? And others would say, why subject ourselves to endless hassle with folks who are trying to keep us down, or even with folks who are sincere, but just don’t understand our situation?

Some wanted to emphasize autonomy. Some wanted to emphasize solidarity. The tension would emerge in diverse contexts and ways, only one of which I just mentioned.

So, what has been the RPS solution?

This is a good example of how intellectually simple most serious social gains are—though they are often very hard to arrive at, and even harder to implement because they are, well, outside what is familiar. Simple ideas, difficult implementation. The thinking went like this. We need autonomy in many situations. We also very often, indeed arguably always need solidarity. How can we have both? We needed cross constituency ties of a new form.

One familiar kind of tie was called a coalition. We could have a massive coalition containing women’s organizations, anti racist organizations, unions, anti war organizations, and so on, which all align about some particular concern, for example ending a particular war or battling global warming. Back in the height of the Sixties anti war work, for example, there were two huge coalitions organized around slightly different approaches to ending the war in Vietnam, each coalition unified only in that respect.

A coalition it would join wouldn’t prevent a women’s organization from operating autonomously. And it would allow a degree of solidarity around whatever is the unifying issue of the coalition. The problem was that the solidarity was very limited. Typically, it could be about only one thing like ending a war. In that case, the component organizations and movements wouldn’t necessarily enjoy the benefits of solidarity from other members about their own agendas, nor would they offer solidarity to other members for anything beyond the one unifying coalition focus. A coalition, in that case, accomplished something, but not enough.

RPS did not want to replicate the Sixties or any other period. And so we tried to come up with a better approach for having both autonomy and solidarity. To reach it, we greatly extended the logic of unifying while also having autonomy. We asked, what if instead of a whole bunch of groups or projects working together on one thing and having solidarity about that one thing but not about anything else, they instead worked together on what we might call their greatest common sum agenda? This was very different, and initially it seemed outlandishly impossible, or even ridiculous.

The idea was that various groups and projects would join into what RPS called a “bloc.” Each group and project would retain its autonomy to pursue its own specific program as it decided. But, each group and project would also pledge to support the programs the other bloc members proposed. The agenda of the bloc would be the sum of all the agendas of all its component organizations, movements, and projects. Each part of the agenda would come from the autonomous leadership of one or another partner in the bloc, but everyone would adopt it all. Everyone would receive and give solidarity even while everyone retained autonomy regarding their own focussed agenda.

I would guess that people saw how all members would then receive and give support, and how everyone would retain their focus. But weren’t you brushing away difficulty by saying everyone would support the whole agenda?

Yes, we were, because it was both more subtle and difficult than it may sound. Suppose we take the women’s movement discussed earlier. It has a program, agenda, and style of operations oriented primarily around feminist activism against sexism. If it joins a bloc with others, then its program becomes one part of the program of the whole bloc. It will receive support and aid from the other members. Reciprocally, as a member, it will support others regarding their programs. What made this hard is two main things.

First, this meant to join an organization that was in a bloc, I had to decide not only that I liked that organization itself, but that I liked the bloc air was in as well. Organizations worried this would reduce their membership.

Second, if a bloc included two organizations with some contradictory programs, the overall bloc program would have to contain both agendas, even though they were contradictory, and the members would have to in some sense support each agenda, even though contradictory. At first that seemed ludicrous, but it wasn’t. If the overall purpose of the bloc was shared by all in it—and in the case of the bloc RPS was seeking to build, the purpose was winning a new society with various agreed features—then the contradictory program components could each be seen as an experiment to see what works to help attain the overall goal. If one aspect was much better, in time it would prove itself and become preponderant. If some other aspect was better, than that would become preponderant. When relative merits were uncertain and unresolved, having the two contrary aspects simultaneously would honor diversity, another RPS value.

As far as implementing this, at first it was clumsy and tense. However, as soon as groups with a particular agenda began to reap the benefits of solidarity coming from others and to celebrate helping others, the confusion began to dissipate so that in practice, it has worked quite well.

Interestingly, though seeking a deeper unity than coalitions afforded was one way that some people came at the idea of the bloc, there was another way some other folks came to the same proposal. The second path said that in a good society people will of course often have disagreements, but they will also share overarching unity as citizens who all want what is good for society. Because of that unity they can live with and even relish and celebrate their differences. They can even have their differences count as virtues as they search for desirable paths forward. This was the same idea as a bloc. A good society is in that sense a king of bloc.

So the idea for having a bloc beyond having a coalition, resulted first from trying to improve on coalitions, and second from trying to embody in the movement what would need to become an approach of society writ large, once society was transformed.

I have to say, my initial reaction to the idea was extreme skepticism. What won me over was the analogy to a good society. In that sense I felt like it was planting the seeds of the future in the present and I understood the logic of that. Later I realized it was also strategically sound.

Yes, strategically, groups with a particular agenda reap the benefits of solidarity and, in turn, help others.

Reforms and Revolution

Lydia, the question of seeking reform or revolution has been contentious among leftists as long as there has been a left, including at the outset of RPS. First, what was the debate?

The debate was to seek reforms and to seek revolution necessarily mutually exclusive approaches, or can they be mutually beneficial approaches?

One side said, since RPS is committed to fundamentally transforming society’s defining institutions it should reject seeking reforms such as increasing the minimum wage or passing a law curtailing pollution. The logic was that a progressive reform will improve some constituency’s conditions but it won’t alter the underlying institutions that will keep producing and reproducing old outcomes. Winning the higher minimum wage leaves the market system and private corporate power in place, for example, to just reverse the gains as soon as they are able to. Similarly for pollution controls, born to be broken. Or reforms aimed at race, gender, or other constituencies.

The stance continued, reforms are unstable. Pressures from existing institutions will in time either reverse them or rearrange circumstances so that while the formal changes persist, the benefits they were meant to convey are reduced or eliminated by offsetting deficits. For instance, winning a wage increase can be eventually offset by rising prices. Those opposing seeking reforms argued that worst of all seeking anything short of revolution reinforces the idea that the essence of the status quo is permanent.

Proponents of reforms argued back, first, that the benefits that accrue from reforms like a higher minimum wage or pollution controls are real and can be quite substantial for the people involved. To dismiss people’s efforts to win such changes for being less than seeking revolution and to not support or to even denigrate such efforts, at best appears and at worst often is callous.

Proponents of seeking reforms continued that while many people dismiss fighting for reforms in the abstract, no one, or no one sane, at any rate, would tell workers seeking a higher minimum wage, or activists trying to end a war that they are nothing but system supporters and should stop their misguided endeavors. Likewise, people do not typically move from uninvolved to revolutionary in one giant leap. It is precisely the experience of fighting for reforms like a higher minimum wage or pollution controls that raises consciousness, confidence, and skills able to sustain longer term commitments.

Andre, did you see it similarly, and what has been the RPS solution? Has it worked?

Yes, I agree with the summary. But I think the dispute often owes to poor terminology. If the opponent of reforms said, simply, I reject an approach which says all we need are reforms and to fight for each one unto itself, then an advocate of reforms could reply, of course, I agree with you. And that is what RPS said. But RPS also said that while rejecting reformism, we need to win reforms both because they matter to people’s lives, and because in doing so people can move toward further commitments. Why not fight for reforms that will benefit people in ways that are non-reformist?

And that became the lynch pin of the RPS solution to this long standing tension. We should of course fight for reforms. We should not say we want the world and we want it now, concluding that to seek anything less now is a damaging sell out. But nor should we say we want such and such a reform, concluding that to seek anything more is utopian nonsense.

RPS decided as others had in the past but without eve fully establishing their point, that we should fight for reforms using language that explains our ultimate motives, aims, and methods. We should fight in ways that build lasting organization. Mainly, we should ensure that upon winning a reform as many people as possible want further gains and are in better position to win them.

So RPS said fight to win gains now but in ways that enhance people’s desire to win greater gains later. Fight to win gains now but in ways that improve people’s means to win greater gains later. Fight to win gains in the present, but talk about the efforts, organize the efforts, and create lasting structures to foster the efforts, all conceived to ensure that the efforts will unleash a trajectory of change leading toward establishing new institutions.

The upshot was we want reform and we want revolution, or, if you prefer, we want non reformist reform struggles as part of a revolutionary project. And the key to how this view became predominant wasn’t so much an intellectual breakthrough—after all, there is nothing complicated about it. The key was for people who favored transforming society to recognize that wanting immediate more modest changes did not somehow negate seeking longer-run fundamental changes.

Can you provide an example of people following this logic?

Well, virtually every campaign and project to win anything that RPS initiated, or for the most part even was closely involved in, followed this logic. Take the two earlier mentioned issues, income and pollution. For example the national campaigns for higher minimum wage, but also local industry campaigns for wage innovations in their particular firms all sought to win some immediate demand, but while doing so they argued for full equitable income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor. They explained their ethics, logic, and their implications, and urged that the sought immediate goal should not be an end but instead a step toward still larger aims. And the same held for all kinds of pollution-related efforts to get cleaner and safer industrial practices. They all sought the immediate gain, of course, but they also addressed larger long-term issues of workplace structure, markets, and profit-seeking. 

Violence and Us

Peter, another issue around which there was much disagreement as RPS was getting started was whether or not to use violence in seeking change. Can you explain what the contending views were?

On one side people said the existing system will not be overcome without elites seeking to defend their advantages, including with force. For that reason, unless we are prepared to overcome violent repression with greater violence in reply, we will ultimately be crushed. Therefore, we have to become both psychologically and materially capable of effectively deploying violence. But we won’t achieve that overnight or automatically when needed. Preparedness requires getting tools that violence needs, and becoming adept and confident using them. So, we have to incorporate the need for preparedness into our calculations. We have to pursue our organizing and winning of reforms and our building of institutions in ways that also make us better able to beat back violent repression since otherwise no matter how good we are at our other activities we will ultimately succumb to repression. And I should say, this was my view at the outset of RPS.

On the other side, people replied that the existing system could not be overcome and replaced with something better on the terrain of violent confrontation. Those who seek fundamental change were not going to out military the military. We would never out violence the training, mindset, and tools of state repression. Futile attempts to do so would make military agencies more aggressive even while also distorting our own values.

If we escalated from warding off blows at rallies with our arms to using sticks or shields, they would hit us with weapons that break sticks and shields. If we escalated to throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails, they would use guns. If we picked up guns, they would use tanks. Violence was and would always be their terrain. So unless we could find a way to win that did not rely on violence, we would lose. We had to become capable of deploying non violence effectively, both psychologically and materially. We had to organize, win reforms, and build alternative institutions in ways that made us steadily better able to deploy non violent struggle and ward off repression.

The dispute wasn’t academic. It wasn’t about some distant crunch time battle. If the path to a new society ultimately required sufficient violence to overcome the police and military, then getting ready for that was essential. No time like the present. But if the path to a new society had to avoid violence as much as possible, then from now onward, being sure to avoid violence was sensible.

What was the RPS solution that permitted people to operate well together?

This dispute could not end in a simple compromise. For one side violence was necessary, and because they deemed it necessary, they also typically deemed it positive and even virtuous. For the other side violence was anathema, and because they deemed it anathema, they also typically deemed it negative and even immoral. The difference was undeniably wide.

That violence was terrain the state dominated and would inexorably win on was so evident as to be irrefutable unless one felt, wait, if we let that view prevail then we will not prepare to be violent, and we will lose, so we must reject that observation despite its obvious validity. I realized eventually that strange as it arguably was, that was my own mindset. I was so focused on police violence that I had myself suffered and that I took for granted, that I took fighting back for granted as well. I was unable to admit that to do so was suicidal. It seemed cowardly to think that way, and to just point at their preparedness, arms, and mindsets in contrast to ours didn’t convince me otherwise, though I can now acknowledge that it should have. And there were a lot of folks like me. Our reaction to violence and coercion was to think we must fight back on the same terms or we are beaten.

So for those arguing against a positive place for violence, beyond some modest exceptions, to reach those favoring violence like myself, they had to explain how non violence could win. And that was the RPS approach. RPS claimed that while fighting with the state on the field of violence was suicidal, creating conditions in which the state could not deploy violence without suffering more than if they did not employ violence could win. And so that became RPS logic.

The task regarding violence was to reduce the state’s ability to deploy it, either directly by measures won against the state that limited its options, such as demilitarizing police and winning civilian community control over police, or indirectly by creating conditions wherein violent repression would do more to aid and enlarge activism than it would do to repress and diminish activism.

You mention exceptions—what was that about?

Consider a strike. Suppose strike breakers, called scabs, prepare to bully their way through the picket line. Locking arms against that, and swinging back at assaults, would be an example of violence that RPS felt warranted and potentially effective. Similarly, suppose we occupy some building and create a blockade of supporters to keep cops or others from entering, albeit non violently. Or at times suppose burning down some hated target would, if you would even call that violence, enlarge movement support. We understood that events, projects, and actions had to continually enlarge support for dissent, resistance, and struggle, and not diminish it. This meant both attracting and holding allies, and also developing and preserving mindsets and behavior patterns that could persist. That was our overarching understanding.

Was there a turning point where you felt this battle was won?

As a stance it was official policy starting with the second convention. So I guess you might say it was won then. But in fact, well after that there were plenty of RPS folks who felt great internal pressure to fight violence with violence and who kept making the case to do so. I think that perspective really collapsed when street gangs in various communities began to undertake political commitments and adopted two surprising policies.

First, they turned in their guns and began to support civilian control of police. And, second, and perhaps even more critical, they began urging their members to apply for jobs within the police, and not long after, RPS acknowledged that to do that as a highly respected path to take. The idea was simple. One way to reduce the effectivity of police or military violence was to create a public situation in which for them to be violent would entrench and widen dissent thereby making it a counterproductive tactic for the state. But a second way was for those who were fit to do so, and this option certainly wasn’t for everyone, to join the police and military and begin transforming them from within, as workers battling for changed relations do in other workplaces.

We had all heard about the incredible success of anti war activists doing this decades earlier during the Vietnam War, and it was surprising how long it took to see the obvious relevance to our own time. Not just anyone could join the police and maintain a steadfast commitment to social activism and RPS program, but for those who could do it emotionally and also physically,  it was clearly a far more effective choice and more courageous too, than going to a sports shop and buying a rifle to practice shooting tin cans to play at preparing for confrontations which would, if they ever happened, end in defeat.

But I would like to go further back to suggest another key turning point that isn’t really discussed much, and isn’t the kind of thing most leftists even acknowledge as at all important, much less critically important.

When football in the U.S. became embroiled in controversy about the damage play did to the athletes, particularly via concussions, it was good, but it could have just petered out. When the anthem protests began, which was, after all, largely about police violence, a new dimension was added. And then there was controversy about violence against women by players. Pile on Trump’s misogyny and together all this exploded the situation.

Suddenly, and this was well before RPS existed and was I think a part of the multifaceted events that paved the way for RPS, you had people all over society discussing violence in diverse forms, and particularly violence against women. Sports shows on radio had commentators blasting the NFL not only for its hypocrisies and violence, but even taking up its connection to the military and police, and its fostering of an alcohol permeated culture by its ads. It isn’t always easy to calculate the impact of a reform struggles but this is perhaps a good example, though likely largely inadvertent, of the positive possibilities. The whole episode was relatively brief, but even brief struggles can lay seeds for more to come, later.

With the exception of Kaepernick and some others protesting police violence, those addressing the culture of violence against women or the sacrifice of player health had as their focus only what they were explicitly addressing. But the percolating impact not only on the future of the sport, or the national attitudes against misogyny slowly and after some interruption went deeper and broader. When a sport show literally suggests, as some did, that fans should perhaps boycott watching football until there were changes, or that teams should be forced to stop their alcohol commercials, seeds were laid regarding what is possible and worthy behavior in pursuit of change, and regarding violence per se. I think such seeds contributed to RPS emerging even though short-run material gains were few and temporary, that time around.

Demands to abolish football, much less if accompanied by threats of violence if it wasn’t done, or that were made disdainfully of more limited reforms to protect the health of players or to reduce and eliminate sexist violations off the field, would have had no broader percolating ramifications, and would have won literally nothing. But more limited calls coming from players, fans, sport writers, and on air announcers, sparked sports audiences and participants toward new awareness, won some modest gains that mattered, and most importantly laid seeds barely even visible at the time to seek and win more later. I think that that emerging mentality was a significant factor that later influenced RPS attitudes and choices and of course continuing activism in sports by participants and fans alike.

Alexandra, as a pacifist, I wonder if you have felt fully satisfied by the RPS approach to violence.

I believe in non violence as a principle, with no caveats. But I also understand that there is a gargantuan difference between violence to enforce domination and extract advantage, and violence in self defense to ward off oppression. That is why I have no trouble respecting and working with people who have far more violence-imbued beliefs than RPS, which itself very strongly favors non violence save in very limited circumstances.

I feel zero hostility toward strikers blocking scabs, even though I wouldn’t do it or recommend it. And I would extend that to a population violently defending against invasion, even though, again, I think such choices are ultimately counter productive.

Living in a world bequeathed by a past with much that is humane and beautiful, but also much that is vile and ugly is not easy. I think RPS has hammered out a politically, socially, strategically, and tactically wise stance. In fact, being honest, given the world we live in, I think it is probably a wiser stance than if RPS were to say no violence, period. Which is why in the discussions about RPS and violence, I never played much of a role. And yet, personally, for myself, I admit that no violence at all is my personal preference.

Is there a contradiction between my personal credo and my organizational credo? Perhaps. But sometimes in horrible circumstances what would be both ethical and sound in more desirable circumstances simply no longer works—at least until desirable circumstances are achieved. I have taken as a model in these matters Dave Dellinger, who was a pacifist, but also a very militant and open-minded activist in the 1960s. His example of being a pacifist yet supporting the Black Panther Party and the Vietnamese fighting against the U.S. invasion, inspired me greatly as I understood it steadily more. I wish more people knew of his courageous acts and views.

RPS is not pacifist in the ethical sense that I favor. Its anti-violence owes overwhelmingly to believing violence is suicidal for trying to win a better society. I think RPS is right about that. But I also have this overarching moral pressure that I feel, though I admit that for history and for humanity it is probably just as well that RPS doesn’t feel that overarching pressure quite as strongly as I do.

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