In which Andre Goldman, Bill Hampton, Senator Malcolm King, and Cynthia Parks recall the first RPS convention, some precursors, and its immediate aftermath of chapter building.

[Author’s Note: This is the fourth 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 titled, NAR 4: Cops, Hope, and First Convention. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections, questions, comments, elaborations, clarifications, whatever, made by the host on hearing the material aloud. The hope is to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke and contribute to discussions about vision and especially strategy for social change.]

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Hope and Activism

Andre, what was most critical for activism to achieve that it hadn’t in prior decades—to have a lasting, persistent, growing, project, RPS?

Information and analysis mattered greatly, of course. But I tend to think it was secondary. I remember hearing a talk about activism, decades back, that focused on a case study. The speaker said—I guess in about 2008—that Paris and France as a whole entered a kind of revolutionary moment in May of 1968. April Paris was like other places at the time, with considerable activism, but along with the activism a vast sea of passivity. Then some modest events happened—initially about male and female hours of access and entry on college campuses—and, bam, virtually overnight the country was in turmoil. And for weeks after that France was, indeed, a revolutionary cauldron of tremendous energy and creativity. Everyone seemed hugely energized to delineate the horrors of modern life and to fight for comprehensive freedom. Everything about society got questioned. Barricades proliferated. Minds were blown. Yet, just a few months later, quiet resurfaced. Passivity to rebellion, back to passivity.

So what happened? How could we explain such sudden turning on and off of gigantic social upheaval? The speaker said that one broad possibility that some people suggested was that ideas about how society works were suddenly successfully widely conveyed, and the newly imbibed wisdom fueled the uprisings. Next, the new insights somehow melted away. The upheaval subsided back into life as usual.

The speaker then amusingly wondered how a whole society could suddenly  become enlightened and then undergo such apocalyptic mental erasure. Mass lobotomy? Everyone bought off? He then suggested another possibility that dramatically affected my thinking.

Before May 1968 there was, he proposed, hopelessness in the minds and hearts of France’s population. Then during May there was hope. Then hope disintegrated. The relatively brief presence of widespread hope freed minds and hearts. Widespread hope aroused and fueled turmoil. But once dissipated, hope’s absence terminated the turmoil.

I thought that claiming aroused hope was key was astute, just as to think newly suddenly learned ideas were key was ridiculous. That is why, when I am asked about ideas that I thought were important for RPS emerging, the one I tend to emphasize is that RPS offered compelling, desirable vision for the future that was sufficient to sustain informed hope. At any rate, that was central for me.

But that was then, what about now?

I later had your thought, too. I think a way to answer it is to compare the half century extending from 1968 to 2020, to the next quarter century, extending from 2020 to 2045. What is the broad difference? What changed so that in the earlier period, despite that large numbers of people at the outset compellingly understood society while countless others were only a hair away from similarly understanding society, and despite periodic upsurges during the following years, the period never generated lasting, steadily growing, sustainable projects for literally winning a new society—yet now we have such a project that is verging on full success.

Is the difference the degree of suffering or our getting hit upside the head more often? Is it new ideas by themselves that turned things around for RPS? Or is it, dare I suggest it, an attitude? There are many who want to say it is such and such a brilliant insight we have had that they didn’t have back in Paris, or it is such and such an event that we experienced that they did not experience earlier. And while I am not denying the importance of ideas or events—I certainly wouldn’t do that—I don’t think they are the sole or even the primary answer. Their growth or dissipation is important, but a spread of activism and especially activism that keeps growing and strengthening, is at least as much caused by other factors as it is by brilliant insights or specific events.

So what was primary for RPS as compared to organizations and campaigns in the Sixties and from then on, too?

Let me offer a few ways of saying this that are probably different sides of one complex dynamic.

One difference is what is above. Hope replaced absence of hope. By that I mean people altered from believing during the first period, that “there is no alternative,” to people really believing, during the more recent period, wait, “there is an alternative.”

A second difference, very connected to the first, is a dispositional switch from people being mainly eager and willing to criticize, reject, and denigrate one another along with criticizing old social relations in the earlier period, to people being more eager and willing to celebrate, advocate, and support one another while proposing new social relations in the recent period.

Related to this was experiencing/recognizing that “united we stand, divided we fall” is not just a catchy slogan but a powerful insight we have to implement to succeed. One person can have impact. Many people can have more impact. But many people don’t combine effectively unless they self consciously acknowledge each other’s diverse contributions and desires. This is related, of course, to why RPS’s concepts highlight the way different sides of life are mutually entwined.

Yet another change is a bit different, though also related. In all communications of anything new, one aspect is style, how we present things, and another aspect is substance, what we present. The former is the cleverness and poetic or emotive punch of our chosen words. The latter is the coherence of our sentences in paragraphs and then of paragraphs in full arguments. The two factors deal respectively in the former case with addressing and even appealing to feelings and countering biases—and in the latter case with evidence and logic.

In the half century up to 2020, I think the prior component was emphasized often to the near exclusion of the latter component rather than there being a good balance. The climax was Trump who paid essentially zero attention to evidence and logic and noticed truth only to distort or deny it while he gave all attention to catch words and slick phrases seeking to stoke passions. But Trump wasn’t alone in that. He just operated more blatantly. The growth of social media played a role. Twitter and later X, and always Facebook distorted communication into short nuggets that precluded serious evidence and argument. The narcissism of selfie photographs was indicative. Clickbait tactics were blatant manipulation and lying and were not confined to the right but instead steadily more prevalent. All this was toxic, and while it certainly wasn’t inevitable, Trump emerged.

In the years since, I think we somewhat fixed the imbalance between style and substance, and I think that doing so has been part of laying the foundation for RPS. I imagine you will later address institutional efforts, including, for example, new media to preserve what was positive about internet connectivity and to avoid what was negative. But I think the upshot is that we realized that while a catchy phrases can matter, we had to emphasize substance while we aggressively avoided manipulation.

I think mutual-aid oriented insights about society plus commitments to develop and share vision and growing desires for organization and program that could win aided RPS forming where similar priorities hadn’t been as strong in the prior half century, at least in the U.S.

And then there is, I think, another factor that I feel I don’t really understand much. Back in the Sixties, what distinguished people who got radical and moving is one thing. But what distinguished people who stayed involved must be another thing as so many fewer did. In the most recent quarter century, the former certainly was also present, but there was much more of the latter. So why was that? I think maybe it was the recent period having greater attention to and facility for dealing with and overcoming peoples’ baggage and fears including feelings of inadequacy, lack of confidence, and insufficient empathy. Was there more or less of that facility for some reason that has owed to the immediately prior periods of both epochs. I have no idea, but it seems unlikely to me. So perhaps it was again a difference in the attitudes and practices at the outset of the two periods, and then fading in the earlier time, but persisting and growing in the recent time. As to whether this makes any sense maybe you will hear that from someone else.

Program

Bill Hampton, you became highly active in immigration and anti-racist politics and then in RPS. You first focused on issues of city life, transportation, and urban planning. You became a prominent inner city activist and candidate, and then a Mayoral candidate and finally Mayor of New York City. So here in the Mayor’s office, I wonder, do you remember first becoming radical?

Growing up Black certainly had profound effects on me. Even under Obama, much as I was inspired when he first won, I had grown horrified at the racist resurgence that his winning provoked which in turn produced Black Lives Matter and sensitized many to Islamaphobia and immigration politics. Joining the campaign for sanctuary in my own town and local church greatly affected me. Feeling the need for those efforts to connect with other emerging efforts primed me for RPS. And the rest seemed to flow inexorably. I never sat down and said to myself I want to be radical. I want to be revolutionary. Instead, something inside just took over, and that was that.

What caused you to think it was worth your time. That we could win?

I honestly have no idea. Given my background of earlier experiences it would have been way more likely, I think, that I would have thought trying to win a new world was idiocy.

Okay, but can you in that case tell us what RPS events or campaigns most personally moved and inspired you, during its first years?

The first thing that comes to mind was very early, arguably during the precursor times. It was at a sanctuary for immigrants who were slated to be deported. The site was a church in San Antonio, Texas. The church had an incredibly courageous pastor, choir, and congregation. I was there, visiting a friend, and supporting and trying to learn. Looking back, this was our Selma. Our Birmingham. San Antonio’s sheriff so disrespected anyone who could side with immigrants that he felt a few swings of police batons would open a clear path to the intended deportees. We knew we had to show him otherwise. We had to show him we would not be easily moved. We had to show him we would not be moved at all.

Police came and their vans congregated. The sheriff in charge announced they were going to take the immigrant families who were receiving sanctuary away for processing and deportation. They had their vans and were set to do what they thought was their duty.

The police arrayed outside, ten abreast and my memory is about ten deep. They faced the church entrance. The Pastor was at the top of the Church steps, and maybe 50 congregants, and the full choir was there with him, and myself as well.

The Pastor told the officials that to take the immigrant families, the police would  have to go through the church’s extended local family. He said, and I will never forget it, “Come ahead if you must. Brutalize our limbs. Shove our beaten bodies aside. You will not break our spirit. You will have to assault us. And again. And again. You may even have to kill us. We will not be moved in our minds. We will only be moved in our bodies and only then if you brutalize our limbs and torsos into physical silence and shove our trembling husks aside. If you feel that is warranted, come ahead.”

The sheriff, unmoved, replied “You have two minutes to vacate. After that, we will forcefully vacate you and take the illegals.” And at that moment everyone locked arms. Then, before the police could even process that much, and it was about fifty people, the doors of the Church opened and there were rows and rows of congregants also with locked arms. You could see the immigrant families, in the distance at the pulpit. To reach them would require carnage if folks stuck to their stated intent. The Church choir began to sing, “We shall not be moved, we shall not be moved…”

The sheriff was a Trump supporter decked out in red with a big old Maga hat. He had buttons, and all. He may as well have been Bull Connor reincarnated. Likely most or all of the police that had accompanied him had hoped on the way to church that they would get in on some action. They were mostly Trump supporters too. But not all the deputies. Two of them sat down with us. We welcomed them, crying. They must have thought they would be unemployed by days’ end, if not worse, but they sat.

The sheriff knew that to try to breach the human barrier would only succeed if we crumbled and ran. The Pastor said, no, we won’t run. Not even close. But the sheriff thought that of course we would run. A few big swings of their overlong batons and we would scurry off like whipped rats. So the Sheriff and deputies marched into the human barrier striking viciously. Blood flowed. Carnage spread. But no one ran and the singing grew louder. “Deep in our hearts we know…”

People in the front were quickly bloodied, physically bowed, but nothing more. As the officials literally tromped on us, there were grunts and moans, but few screams. And then, incredibly, with the choir singing, and with more folks from within the church coming out to lock arms, and with the onlookers clearly horrified, the defenders, including myself, actually reached up and embraced our tormentors. Our bear hugs diminished their capacity for brutal swings. And there was even a strange kind of intimacy about it. It wasn’t begging. It wasn’t fighting. It was offering a degree of understanding. We didn’t fight hate with hate, but with compassion and steadfast intent. We didn’t fight racism with racism, but with solidarity. After a bit, some deputies simply relented. And then the sheriff did too. He had to. Yes, they could have physically demolished us, leaving a battlefield of blasted souls in their wake, but nothing less would succeed in taking the families, and that was simply too much.

A retreat began, and then, incredibly, the Pastor, bent bloody but not beaten, calmly invited the sheriff and his key deputies, if they wished, to come into the church. They just had to leave their batons and guns with their fellows outside. If they did that, they were welcome to talk to the immigrant families and the Pastor, and others. Tears were flowing, medics were aiding people, and in what I will never know but suspect was a shock for the Pastor like for the rest of us, after what seemed like an eternity of him just standing there staring at the bloodied Pastor, the Sheriff took off his gun and walked with the Pastor into the Church.

I don’t know what their talk inside was about, but the next day the Sheriff stood before dozens of press. He said “I heard the illegals. I heard their stories. I heard their supporters. I heard their Pastor. I will no longer recognize federal orders, or any orders at all, to arrest immigrants.”

He drooped his mic and walked off. It was the beginning of the end, not just in Texas and the U.S., but around the world, of the vicious anti-immigrant, blame the immigrant, expel the immigrant, kill the immigrant mindset. It was the shortest, longest press conference ever.

Fierce conflicts with so many horrible losses marred prior years. So many other Sheriffs didn’t budge. So many kids who were separated from parents and violated. So many activists who were clubbed and jailed. But San Antonio Sunday broke that pattern and brought an end to the blame the immigrant, shun the immigrant, beat the immigrant, cage the immigrant, expel the immigrant, kill the immigrant era. It set the stage for humane policy regarding the coming years’ migrations to escape climate catastrophes. San Antonio’s sheriff may or may not have found his humanity, but either way, activism won. When those who are paid to impose rule say no to their employers and break bread with presumed violators, the end of unjust rule is at hand. For me this was such an incredible sight, such an incredible event, so meaningful in so many ways, that, I have to recount it in answer to your question.

I actually, I interviewed that sheriff years later for a retrospective. He cried as he remembered the scene at the church. After that, he had gone still further and become an RPS member. But, his conversion aside, what was your view of cops back then?

Before San Antonio, I hated the cops. To me, my family, and my friends, cops spelled danger. They spelled death. When they came, we went. Our way to deal with cops, before San Antonio, was to imagine fighting fire with fire—eye to eye, toe to toe. Call them pigs. Throw a rock. Day dream of beating them up. But then run like hell.

The sanctuary didn’t make me a pacifist, but I saw how militant nonviolence plus cautious compassion could disarm and defeat what would have totally demolished any attempt to fight back. Divide the police. Defuse the police. Finally make the police into allies. I learned that if we do that their powerful paymasters become weak and then pitiful.

What about cursing cops?

I won’t lie. It can feel good. Maybe sometimes it can even help overcome fear and an ingrained tendency to obey. “You pig, get out of my face.” But it puts emotion in command. It immediately angers cops. To instead address cops as fellow citizens puts strategy in command. It can eventually disarm cops. If we had cursed the sheriff in San Antonio do you think he would have become who you later found him to be? I learned that too.

I had heard much of what you have here recounted, of course, but not as movingly as you put it. I can only imagine your experience and even hearing of it, like this, has me shaking—I don’t know if it is anger, joy, or both gripping me. Still, now is now. What about RPS program itself? How did that begin to emerge?

I think with the above and so much else happening, program became a natural focus. It started in earnest, I think, against the backdrop of the Sanders campaign and the also pretty recent Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements in the U.S., plus similar efforts elsewhere, like the huge popular surges and electoral follow up in Greece and Spain and then the huge women’s demonstrations against Trump. I had myself been moved by Occupy and very involved in it.

But then came Trump’s victory and that was truly traumatic for many of us. In a very short time he was appointing climate deniers, vicious racists, misogynists, and even overt fascists. The orgy of right wing excess was incredibly depressing because so many feared the country wanted it—but time revealed, even if it took eight, twelve years. The country had been confused. The country did not want it.

After Trump won, there was a surge of resistance. But the larger task, very difficult in those depressing times, was to not only ward off Trumpism but also move toward winning a better future. This meant we had to learn and act on many lessons of the recent period.

When millions of people are in motion because of austerity, racism, war, and global warming, and a vile lunatic who wants to turn back time seizes power, the ensuing surge could either fizzle for want of positive focus and wide solidarity, or it could move toward encompassing program and associated organization. The latter needed to happen, and it finally did, though it wasn’t a quick and easy path.

First, there had already been some program proposed by the Sanders campaign. Almost simultaneously Black Lives Matter rebounded from initially largely ignoring program to slowly but effectively very seriously offering it. And yet, if you look back, you will see that most people, even on the left, were still pretty unimpressed with developing or even acknowledging program, whether that of Sanders or BLM. And the same happened when the massive women’s marches against Trump offered program. If you look at the articles of the times you will see there were dozens of essays, even on the left, about Trump’s insanities for every couple of pieces explicitly about the BLM or Woman’s program, or even about program at all.

A crucial step was therefore starting to get the resistance to Trump to have a more substantive, forward looking orientation. It wasn’t that people weren’t asking what’s next and how do we persist. Lots were. It was that the discussion rarely was about program, about substance, and especially about building encompassing multi-issue, multi-tactic organization, much less about ultimate destination.

In response to Trump trying to hugely escalate or even just maintain current rates of deportation, for example, the most forward thinking activists moved to organize sanctuaries at the city or state level in places such as Los Angeles and even in Texas. Perhaps earliest were the demonstrations at airports when Trump began his vile efforts. Then I remember a mosque burning in Texas followed by a temple handing over keys to the Muslims who lost their Mosque. Incredible things like that happened, but tying together the sentiments into lasting structure with overarching positive aims was way more difficult. That didn’t happen for many years more.

To continue the reaction to Trumps’ anti immigrant efforts, even after he was no more, activists created sanctuaries more locally in churches and in some universities and even in some private homes where people offered to harbor deportees to protect them. One solidarity slogan was, “If you take our friends, you have to take us too, and neither they nor we are going without a fight.”

Venues like churches or campus centers provided housing and protection and when deportation authorities even sneezed, such venues were guarded by masses of supporters to block entry. During the days and nights of the sanctuaries, activists held teach-ins and cultural events, and otherwise used the experiences to build support, develop trust, develop shared commitments, and even enjoy the experience.

This kept building until later in the 2020s when groups of major athletes welcomed immigrants into sports arenas the same way the New Orleans Saints arena was used to house Hurricane Katrina victims earlier, only we held more cultural and educational events to accompany the safe residency. This, unsurprisingly, stopped deportation schemes dead. And it also built trust and sincere solidarity. It created a mutual aid mindset that had been absent, and, honestly, was absent in some other anti-reactionary, anti-fascist activism.

Another good later step was that in response to even remotely white supremacist Cabinet appointees, activists exposed their vile views, proposed progressives who would be better in their posts, and said clearly why they would be better. It wasn’t “better us than you.” It was “better our policies than your policies.” We used creative tactics including demonstrating where the appointees worked, lived, and came from to demand that they go home and we get better appointees.

Prominent athletes welcomed immigrants, migrants, and homeless poor into sports arenas on many college campuses. You can imagine, I hope, how life changing this was for the immigrants but also for the athletes themselves. Then a few NFL and NBA teams’ players did the same. I remember going to the Philadelphia Eagles’ football field, to provide support where athletes, immigrants, and migrants mingled. Tents holding families were visible. Kids played. And the team worked out. That advanced a mutual aid mindset and built incredible momentum. Escaping global heating abetted high waters, massive storms, and political repression all became collective, public responsibility. Mutual aid and fight back, not exclusion and resignation, became the norm.

I was part of a large rally that marched from a poor neighborhood four miles to an executive’s home. Neighbors and media watched us arrive. I spoke through a bullhorn, “Here lives our war mongering, climate violating, Secretary of Defense. We have come to his home to expose his views. We have come to advocate progressives for his post. We go where these criminals work. We go where they live. They want us driven off. But how? Tear gas their offices? Swat team their neighbors?”

Perhaps the most effective project for its long run implications in early RPS days, was when, in response to enlarged budget proposals for military and police, activists positively pointed out better ways to spend the funds and aggressively demanded positive changes in police budgeting, structure, policy, and community oversight and control, and in the use of military bases, including using them to build low income housing funded by military budgets rather than to eat up their budgeted funds in deadly pursuits. We fought to earmark the first houses built to soldiers who had worked on them and wanted them.

We invited and welcomed police into neighborhood and even household meetings to discuss how to create safer communities and avoid racist policing. Of course at first only a few police related, but then steadily more. We went to military bases and to police stations too, to organize. Of course this all took time. But I think it helped move us from resisting reaction to seeking positive gains and that it helped contribute to the RPS-type activism that would follow.

Stopping police violence as had intensified after George Floyd’s murder had remained a priority but then it became something more. We went to military bases and police stations and organized. We listened and we proposed. We fought, but we also made friends. I won’t make believe this was easy. There was vicious hostility to overcome. There were real differences to deal with. Truth be told, we often got the shit kicked out of us. But necessity birthed invention. It was a winning path and we took it. Slowly but steadily we made headway. The demand to build housing for all resonated.

The point we came to understand was that we had to find worthy things to demand and also effective ways to win our demands which together appealed to every crucial constituency and which polarized no worthy constituency away from participation, even as we also steadfastly opposed every racist, sexist, and classist move authorities made. Police and military were employed to do piggish things, but they weren’t pigs. They were potential allies.

As momentum grew and a degree of coherence and clarity emerged, we began to build grassroots neighborhood and workplace assemblies, though first steps had to come first. And of course things developed differently and at different rates in different places. Before long people realized in that deep way that direct experience fosters that on top of demands and actions we needed organization. I remember thinking when Trump first won, would it be desirable that for the next four years we only have disparate, sometimes linked sometimes disconnected movements about all manner of separate issues but overwhelmingly aimed only at preventing reaction? Or would it be more desirable to have at least one overarching, multi-issue, multi-tactic organization emphasizing not only fighting against reaction but also proposing, organizing for, and trying to win elements of positive program and vision? Could we do that? There really wasn’t a choice. We had to do that. But, again, it took time.

And I also wondered, would it be better for a new visionary organization to look like those we have had in the past, or can we conceive and implement powerful new means to welcome and enhance diversity, to celebrate and practice collective self management, and to chastise and structurally guard against sectarian, apocalyptic, and also too narrow organizing? Again, there really wasn’t a choice. We had to do that. And again, it took time.

The answers to concerns like those, felt by a lot of folks from disparate places and conditions, obviously fed into the channels of thought and deed that led to RPS. But I don’t want to suggest it was all simple or quick. That’s why I keep saying it took time. There was so much incredibly passionate anger, so much defensiveness, so much chaos, it was very hard to get coherent results.

Indeed, one odd aspect of those times and actually before as well, and, well, honestly, for decades in my experience, was that there was a whole lot of resistance to arriving at broad, encompassing, shared program which had virtually nothing to do with the specifics of program per se. It had to do, instead, with what I thought was a kind of self defense by those manifesting anti-programmatic inclinations. People were afraid that highlighting program, vision, or even anything intellectually substantive, would lead to the most verbal, confident, and well educated as well as less time-pressured people dominating discussions and winding up governing what transpired. And that was in fact a perfectly fair and wise worry, but the solution wasn’t to have no program but to proactively guard against the elite-producing tendency.

In retrospect, we came to understood the multiple implications of structure and policy that elevated what in time we called the coordinator class, but back then it wasn’t so easy to even talk about so that resistance to that possibility often deteriorated into resistance to careful thought itself (such as thought about program or vision) which obstructed dealing with the substance of movement goals and structure. It was truly frustrating. The people understandably and rightly afraid of elevating top down movements that coordinator class members would dominate and that working class people would find repellent even if it happened with only the best intentions, created an anti-program anti-vision mood and ironically that mood tended to lead to exactly what they were trying to avoid filling the void, albeit predictably poorly.

Still, people’s responses to program remained disjointed. A project would aggressively adopt one aim, say abortion rights or eliminating the electoral college or protecting migrants and immigrants or providing housing. Another project would equally aggressively adopt a different aim, from among those, or, say, pollution controls or a wealth tax or a higher minimum wage. But few strayed from their own focussed priority to embrace a full program. Activism thus most often occurred in isolated silos. You do this, I do that. That atomism fostered a kind of me first, or at least my concern first attitude. We desperately needed an approach that would allow and promote overarching unity. And we desperately feared regimented, sectarian unity.

We also knew that even with participatory intentions there was nothing good about distancing ourselves from careful evaluation and exploration, but I want to be clear that I think the sentiment that surfaced was not actually anti-intellectualism, but anti-subordination to people who were in position to monopolize conceptual and decision making advantages. That sentiment, even if not always how it was manifested, was highly warranted. It just needed better follow-up.

I remember incredible arguments where the polished advocates of reason—and somehow it was often only their own reason and their dominance of reasoning that they advocated—would encounter opposition that for all the world looked to be rejecting reason itself, and even rejecting thinking itself, rather than only rejecting a perversion of reason that intended to advance only the interests of a few.

What finally made the underlying truth and participatory need pretty clear was to hear the undercurrents of sentiment and see who lined up where. It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t resolve quickly, but, over a period of years major progress was made, though even now this is still resolving. A major gain for RPS’s future from analyzing the Trump phenomenon and the responses to it was RPS deciding early on that an “anti intellectuals” dynamic was about class interests, not about rejecting thought.

I remember hearing a speech that went pretty much like this: “We must combine campaigns to end deporting immigrants through local airports with campaigns to clean up plumes of toxic waste from those same airports. We must mesh efforts to curb CO2 emissions with efforts to protect the poor from rising waters and to create and ensure good jobs and new housing. We must combine ending use of fossil fuels with preserving the incomes and improving the circumstances of coal and oil workers. Community centers must feature speakers on women’s rights and also on wage struggles. Activists for prison reform must support and be supported by activists for solar power. Activists for electoral renovation must support and be supported by activists for military reduction.”

It really wasn’t complicated. RPS wanted those who focused most on ending war to aid those who focused most on legalizing immigration to aid those who focused most on reversing global warming and resource depletion, initiating toxic clean-up, establishing tax reform, improving public spaces, distributing food and medicine, ending sexual harassment, curbing police violence, enlarging worker safety, and advancing income redistribution. We wanted real solidarity.

And program? What became of seeking program?

As calls for program grew, certain programmatic ideas gained traction. For example, on the national scale, there was momentum to reduce inequality by raising the minimum wage. Then people sought increased taxes on the rich. Then there was massive popular desire for shortening the work day and the work week to attain full employment and generate more leisure.

Similarly, people wanted to improve quality of life by implementing health care for all, wanted to build desirable housing for all, wanted enriched schooling for all including cancelling student debt and making higher education free. And people wanted to dramatically reorient government spending from war and social control to rebuilding infrastructure and enlarging social services, and wanted to implement free day care for all.

This wasn’t yet a set of coherent demands for new basic underlying institutions but some of those involved already had desires for fundamental change. More important, in practice these pursuits led inexorably to discussions that propelled such longer term desires.

I think a case can be made that an unsung exemplary step came considerably earlier from an organization called Greenpeace that addressed mainly ecological concerns but then adopted the Black Lives Matter program. It went almost unnoticed at the time but I think it foreshadowed the kind of cross constituency and multi focus solidarity that was brewing.

I am rambling a bit, I fear, but I just want to be clear. We hoped that while single issue movements (about a particular war, immigration, or global warming), or highly focussed organizations, (Greenpeace was an example) would each and all persist and retain their priorities, but also sign on to an overarching agenda and lend their support to all its components. This was the missing aspect of seeking change. It wasn’t just that we wanted good programmatic ideas or demands. Those existed. It was that we needed to meaningfully share good program by all of us supporting campaigns not only for the one or two aspects that were immediately most meaningful to us due to our own personal past priorities or current ties, but we needed to support all aspects so as to foster real mutual aid and solidarity and make each aspect stronger than it could be alone. Those who focused most on war would aid those who focused most on immigration would aid those who focused most on global warming, would aid those who focussed most on economy, would aid those who focussed most on racism, would aid those who focussed most on gender and sexuality, and so on, in a web of emerging mutual aid. A compelling example of that was when labor activism grew at the same time as campus support for Palestine and opposition to war spending, and the two started to support one another.

Why did some folks start to seek an organization, RPS, that would pursue comprehensive rather than siloed aims? What distinguished those folks from others who still prioritized only one focus of concern? Was it mainly understanding? Was it a kind of megalomania or arrogance that proved useful? Or was it an attitude that saw difficulty as obstacles to overcome and that we expected to overcome, and so we sought key obstacles and prioritized addressing them, and then we got lucky and did so? I have no idea. I only know that it happened. And the truth is, whether it was luck, wisdom, or confidence, doesn’t matter. You figure it out—that’s what your interviews are for, aren’t they?

Toward The Convention

So, Andre, we come to the founding convention. Did it matter greatly to what followed? What was it like? How did it emerge? What conflicts occurred?

I think having the founding convention was fundamentally important, though at the time we all had doubts. Hell, I was so worried about failing it was hard to sleep or even eat as the time approached. Would enough people attend? Would attendees divide over minor differences and blow it all up, or would we unify over major agreements and create something that would last? Would we attain collectivity and do good? Or would we implode and do harm?

We wanted an organization suited to the times, oriented to win a new society, and able to facilitate mutual trust. We wanted the world. But we worried that attendees would nitpick priorities, ignore one another’s’ actual views, and fail to find unity.

One aspect of having the convention was mechanics. We didn’t want fifty people, or a hundred, but a few thousand. We already had two or three dozen local groups who hoped to become part of a national organization, but there was no agreed structure or membership criteria. We lacked enough coherence to have the first convention be a gathering of delegated representatives. Even more, most who would want to attend weren’t in any such local group.

A bunch of people took initiative. We could have been terrible at it and alienated others by seeking power. We could have been precipitous and incompetent due to ignoring problems. Luckily, instead, we had considerable credibility because of our other participation in past collective efforts. We proved able to mediate and organize.

Conveniently, most of the mechanical work creating a convention was familiar from past gatherings, and could be accomplished without being elitist. We had to get space. Put out a call. Arrange housing. Develop an agenda. We wanted to get a very broad assemblage into a venue for a long weekend that would settle on a clear agenda and congenially arrive at a shared initial program without blocking participation. We knew some people who would attend would have deep ties with others attending. But we also knew most who came would have only modest or no prior ties with others attending.

Did you have a conscious plan to survive until a more structurally rooted gathering was in place? What was the initial idea for what the emergent organization would look like?

We sought a bridge toward a workable future, but to say we were sure it would happen would be a gigantic exaggeration. Almost everyone planning the convention was super nervous. We knew if the effort failed, it would delay and might even prevent for a long time arriving at a multi issue, multi tactic, vision-oriented organization. I remember losing a lot of sleep worrying about such possibilities.

To cover all consequential matters, folks needed to arrive at the conference familiar with diverse proposals for program and structure. Attendees needed to have understood the issues and added their own views. To facilitate that, we disseminated programmatic and a structural proposals months before the convention. We asked people to bring their concerns, amendments, and extensions. We wanted everyone prepared to collectively decide defining issues and post-conference responsibilities.

We had to return home from the convention with a workable but not necessarily perfect agenda. For one thing, we knew there was no way to know what would be perfect. For another, we realized that even if we could chaotically settle on perfection, it would be only marginally better or even a lot worse than “less perfect” agreement reached with a higher level of unity and mutual support. We needed a sense of proportion and modest compromise. We agreed that decisions would be provisional until the fledgling organization could attract more members into local chapters, meet again, and solidify its definition by enacting corrections and improvements. We didn’t seek false perfection immediately. We sought good results able to flexibly become better results over time.

So how did that happen?

We had many planning meetings. So many meetings. We consulted many additional activists about how to establish initial program and structure to promote needed improvements in the future. That is no simple task. That is, we were going to seek program and simultaneously a mindset that we would all leave with but would not defend, not iron-clad, but instead change to get better. We proposed that the organization should centrally address economics/class, politics/power, culture/race, kinship/gender/sexuality, ecology/survival, and international relations without privileging any one of those above the rest. We proposed as aims to seek to transcend capitalism, racism, sexism, and authoritarianism. We urged that we had to explore and advocate long term vision sufficient to inspire wise current activity. We had to acknowledge that program is always contingent on place and time and so we had to plan to continually update analysis, vision, and strategy in light of new evidence and insights.

We prioritized leaving plenty of leeway not only for insights that might emerge at the convention, but for what we would learn later. This mindset may even have been our key contribution. Our first convention prioritized continual improvement. People didn’t adopt an identity to defend. We instead considered our shared agreements as a contingent basis on which to build solidarity. We would adapt to new circumstances and refine our views as needed. We knew loyalty to what we had settled on was necessary, but we also knew that that meant we should continually, respectfully, and collectively improve it. Our standard of accomplishment was to change for the better tomorrow, not to have been right yesterday.

Did you propose specific societal vision?

Some, yes, but we emphasized that everything we proposed, even if ratified, would be contingent on a better-grounded future convention that would ratify or change it. We believed for an organization to be successful, it had to have considerable agreement in its initial iteration, but had to also welcome future innovation. We tried to propose just enough societal vision to provide just enough organizational unity and clarity to move forward. We thought the convention would settle on some of what we proposed and reject some, put some on hold and adapt or replace some, but in any event that whatever it decided would apply only until a second convention which could be more definitive due to having attained greater membership and established local chapters able to learn from the experience of members working together.

Malcolm, you attended the convention, though you weren’t an organizer. How did you relate to the pre-convention proposals? Were you confident that the convention would work well? Did it? What are some key things you remember from it?

When I got the pre-convention package I remember being simultaneously hopeful and doubtful. But confident? Not nearly. I first feared that too few people would agree to attend. Then, I worried that all the fine folks who were indicating they would attend would do so, but would agree on nothing, and so it would all fail, squandering our potential by leaving people demoralized. There were so many issues and ideas. So much to consider. I worried people would turn away, or make believe they were prepared, but on getting together, fragment.

In fact, however, the convention was a huge success. I remember arriving and being impressed with the crowd. But once the convention got going something more became evident. People didn’t come to have their own way. But neither was the mood to reflexively compromise simply for the sake of unity. Instead enlarging real solidarity was everyone’s aim. And everyone really had immersed themselves in the ideas and issues.

How do I explain? You know how people will discuss some possible wording of something and it will be endless and tedious with each person fighting more to ensure that their words win, so that they personally win, rather than each person seeking the best outcomes? Each person wants their own words with little or no attention to what others want. And they just keep pushing. We avoided that.

Convention Time

But how did you avoid it?

The sessions to address organizational vision and definition always started from pre-convention more broadly amended versions of what had been earlier circulated. The decision making went item by item. As people had paid attention before arriving at the conference, and had in some cases added refinements or alternatives beforehand, often there was nearly no dissent and an item would pass very quickly. Other times someone would have an amendment or even a replacement to propose. It would be heard, and the person would give a case for it. Rather than at that point asking for an immediate rebuttal, the chair would ask for a straw vote. If there was only minimal support for the amendment, she would ask to have a second advocate speak, and then ask if anyone wanted to speak against—and for the most part, no one would. There would be no point. She would ask if the proposer had any questions. Generally not. Did anyone want to add an additional case for the proposal. Sometimes someone would, mostly not. A vote would occur, and the item would typically fail as it simply didn’t have support. No rancor and no time wasted.

On the other hand, if the straw vote showed a considerable minority, or a majority or even overwhelming support for the change, the chair would ask if anyone supporting the unchanged version wanted to reply. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If no, the change would quickly win. If yes, the person would present, and there would be some discussion and what was special was that members didn’t want to win just for the sake of winning. It was not  contending egos. Everyone wanted a decision that would be worthy and universally supported. And it happened, over and over.

Whenever a decision was sharply divided, even after a few arguments were offered, debate would continue or the whole decision would be delayed so people could think on it over night. As a result, every ratified decision was at least two thirds for, and usually far more than that.

I think this wasn’t that our group was better people than past groups, or more mature, or anything like that. It was that we had informed hope that what we were doing was going to really matter. We felt, let’s get this right and we knew that right wasn’t so much a matter of the abstract virtue of agreed positions, but being sure to have agreement about positions, and to have flexibility to go forward to improve them.

We thought, this is not a game. This can win. We have a responsibility. Dump ego. Cultivate mutual respect. That kind of feeling largely wiped out anti-social inclinations except in the most narcissistic folks—and, well, I guess the overwhelming tone of the event kept even that group quiet. I suspect this arose overwhelmingly from the advance preparation and the new moods that were arising among people. Our methods mattered, but I don’t think they were the only thing.

In particular, at the convention itself, I remember some late night small group chats. No one was fixated on battling over specifics. Everyone was excited about the emerging level of unity and mutual trust. Instead of each person acting as a kind of atom competing to have the most of his or her own words or suggestions adopted, each person was intent on generating great unity and flexible readiness for innovation regardless of the source of each idea or phrase. And the discussion of initial specific activist program for the organization was similar. In that case, it started almost from scratch. The discussions went longer, but accommodations occurred and everyone supported the results.

Do you remember the initial activist program?

Sure. We didn’t want a laundry list but it was hard to prevent. Remember we were just getting started. There were nearly 3,000 people at the convention. On the one hand, we needed to focus limited initial energies on some key campaigns that we could start organizing around. On the other hand, people were thinking about programmatic ideas two ways. First, we each wanted pursuits good for the organization. Pursuits that met the programmatic guidelines the convention settled on. But second, we wanted pursuits we could immediately strongly support. Among so many people from so many backgrounds, there were many favorite ideas. It was a bit of a miracle, then, but we managed to limit our initial campaigns to seeking:

• 30 hours of work for 45 hours pay
• Sharply progressive property, asset, and income taxes, with no loopholes
• A dramatically-increased minimum wage of $25 an hour
• A comprehensive full employment policy
• Curriculum reform, improved teaching methods, enriched teacher-student relations, and reduced average class size to a maximum of 20 students per teacher in all schools.
• Guaranteed free education (through college) for anyone who wants it—plus past student debt forgiveness.
• Amnesty for immigrants and regulated but ultimately open borders for ecological and political refugees.
• Community control of police, an end to mass incarceration, and reassessment of current prison terms and policy.
• Protecting the rights of women to control their own bodies and to enjoy equal benefits and responsibilities throughout all parts of society, including abortion rights, public day care, and equal payment requirements. 
• Cessation of arms shipments abroad and elimination or conversion of overseas military bases to peaceful purposes such as natural crisis assistance.
• Improved preventive medicine, including increased public education about health-care risks and prevention, a massive campaign around diet, and serious penalties for corporate activity that subverts health in employees or consumers.
• Universal health care for all, including a single-payer system with the government providing comprehensive and equal coverage for all.
• Civilian review of drug company policies including price controls and severe penalties for profit seeking at the expense of public health up to and including nationalization of offending pharmaceutical companies under the auspices of Congress and an expanded Center for Disease Control.
• A truly massive Marshall Plan level national and international campaign to turn the tide against global warming, water depletion, and other life threatening environmental trends

Do you have any special memories of the convention itself?

A few, yes. Remember this was nearly twenty years ago. One is a bit personal. There was a speaker who galvanized the place. She recounted her trajectory, as many had, to become revolutionary. It was first student organizing, and then, not long before deciding to come to the convention, community organizing.

She spoke very eloquently of being sick of hearing activists and leftists constantly complain about how bad things are and perpetually blame everyone but themselves for lack of success. She told how a few years before she had been moved by hearing a report that was very different from usual in that it pinpointed problems of radicals with the intent of correcting them. Her talk was immediately memorable, but the fact that we got together and became life partners made it all the more so.

Another thing, in particular, that I remember, was the down time. By that I mean the periods when people could congregate, meet, and share experiences. You could call together groups for such sessions—for example, by job, or locale, or whatever. I think those sessions may have been the real birth place of RPS, even more than the general assemblies where decisions were made. The informal meetings were what led to local chapters and to work groups in particular fields like medicine, sports, and so on.

Post Convention Complexity

Cynthia, you watched your family lose their modest home in 1998 due to the housing crash of the time. Years later you became an advocate for inexpensive quality public housing. You became, as well, a staunch proponent of what was then called rights for the city and you have worked within RPS ever since on related programs and organizing while staffing diverse campaigns. A militant activist, a tireless staff contributor to project after project, you were the Secretary of Housing in the second RPS shadow government. To start, do you remember first becoming radical?

Yes, vividly. But first let me say, I have seen some of your interviews to date and I wish we had had such an oral history to enjoy and learn from and build off of back when we were first getting started. Of course we wouldn’t have slavishly mimicked it, but I think it would have informed many of our choices and mostly given us confidence to pursue our desires. I could imagine reading it, a section at a time, and questioning the meaning for our own efforts, and then going on to read more. But I also had a fear. The people you interviewed were all so immersed in the project, so intimately and fully involved that I didn’t get a picture of the views of so many other folks who were less fully involved.

I have lots more interviews to do and I will try to elicit more bearing on your concern…but inevitably inter viewing RPS types is going to be less informative about non-RPS types…

I guess, but to answer your actual question, when I was six, as you researched, my family lost its home. I can still remember the pain and harm. I can remember my angry confusion. My mom explained the economy was in trouble. We didn’t have funds to pay our bills. The banks were taking our home. When I asked how our not having a home helped the economy, or anyone, my mother told me it helps the bankers. It helps the rich. I watched my father sink into alcohol-soaked depression. Or that’s what I call it now. I guess then to my eyes it was just crotchety, angry, scaring and even violent moodiness. I watched my mother try to protect the family from poverty and from my father’s negativity and violence. I remember ice covering the insides of our windows. I remember resistant mites and vicious lice. In my dreams I can still see sewage overflowing our toilets. Survival occupied our minds. No one had a notion of a better world. At six, I believe my life was mapped out, but it was only years later that I knew what I had become.

It is incredibly daunting to discover how many people we know, or think we know, whose pasts resemble yours. What lives on inside you, to restrict you still, from all that?

There is probably more than I even know, but let me tell you one thing which I think is far more common, albeit with many sources, than people realize or recognize, at least in folks who don’t readily display signs of it. In my head, there is an uninvited voice, a kind of intruder who is always ready to lecture me. This needy, nasty voice is a residue of earlier times. In my case it stems mostly from upbringing. Often, for others it may be partly that, but also partly schooling, teachers, bullies, and so on. The voice says, “you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.” And so the voice has a kind of agenda. It beats you, its host, into submissive defeat by telling you, over and over, that you are unable to do this or that. You are too dull, too weak, too fucking stupid. It seems strange to harbor this residue inside your mind. What is my head doing holding me down? But it happens. And for people who have this hitchhiker on board to accomplish things is much, much harder than were the hitchhiker gone. But to get rid of the hitchhiker is no easy task. Often we never fully achieve it. So a person may seem accomplished and capable, but may constantly have to battle against the hateful hitchhiker to do anything and everything of substance. This residue resides in women, in minorities, in workers. It makes those who it afflicts feel small. Some do totally defeat it, some overcome it a good part of the time, but many succumb more or less completely. This is perhaps oppression’s most vicious impact, yet it is almost never admitted out loud. Indeed, few who know me know I have this nasty creature always muddying my mind.

I don’t know what to say. I guess not having this hitchhiker is key for having confidence while having the hitchhiker causes all kinds of pain, but maybe strength too, sometimes.

I think there is probably more than one variant. The creature has various modes and personalities, but yes, that is certainly one effect, as for me, no doubt. But maybe we can move on…

Okay, though I have to think about how to perhaps address their hitchhiker baggage with others. Alright, so, can you tell us what were the most personally inspiring RPS events or campaigns specifically for you?

For me, which is to say for the direction and content of my life, many, many events and campaigns had profound impact, especially those relating to city life like the campaigns for military and prison conversion to build housing. But if you are asking for the kind of epochal personal event people experience, I can’t even begin to tell you why—because I don’t really know why—but two things that come immediately to mind are quite oddly and unexpectedly when I first used People’s Social Media and when I attended the first talk by Edward Snowden after he was pardoned and welcomed back to the U.S.

I think using our new social media moved me so much because I was doing something natural, nothing special, but I was doing it by way of an institution conceived and built by RPS people that I knew was going to last all the way into a new society. I think it was the first time I felt that level of confidence in our future. What we were doing would last in the way we hoped. Something about that just grabbed me. It said to me that we were going to win.

And the Snowden talk, it wasn’t so much what he had to say, though that was very good, it was that it felt like a milestone of progress and potential. I felt, just sitting there in the audience, that the divisions that were so often destructive were, in time, going to be bridged and it wouldn’t be by some kind of saccharine make believe where we all smile at each other and say have a nice day, but by real understanding that moved everyone forward.

Once the first convention was over, what do you think kept things going? There was a lot of conflict in the early period, wasn’t there?

In any social project some things get easier as time passes, unless, of course, things literally explode before they improve. The hardest part is nearly always just getting started. This is because when first starting anything, one is acting without evidence that one’s actions will have impact. It involves reason and passion, but it also takes a leap of faith. Since nothing is certain, there is always some leaping into the unknown in any new pursuit, but as time passes, there is more evidence and more reason to expect impact. It becomes a lot easier to act when you believe you will have an effect than when having impact is more a tenuous wish rather than a secure expectation. And this general picture applied to RPS. We were leaping. We were acting without certainty. We had to manufacture hope and motivation from meager evidence.

Another factor that kept things going, followed from the first. In the early days of endeavors, poor choices can be fatal. If you are just getting going, and you opt for some action or formulation and it falls flat and fails, it can derail everything. Imagine if the first convention had been a bust.

The same applies if you are trying to create a local chapter. But later this becomes steadily less true. Once you are well underway, bad choices will still be bad, but far less decisively. Your project is more robust. Mistakes can be side-stepped and corrected, and the more a project embraces diversity, the more it will have flexible insurance against sudden collapse. When one path doesn’t work, okay, you have others ready to pursue.

When we came out of the convention we were just getting started. Fear of failing was everywhere. Fear of failing caused many people to think each choice was paramount. We vested each choice, often, with too much weight. We tended to defend positions too inflexibly. Imagine meeting with ten or fifteen folks to form a chapter. Your life is changing. It is urgent stuff. You are discussing how often to have meetings, or how to conduct them, or who to invite to the next one. It can seem like everything is always at stake. It can seem like you have to get this choice right, or you will atrophy and fail. Can you see how feeling thus, you might invest too much and fight too hard over modest or even minor differences, because you see the differences, instead, as monumental?

I can see it and I have experienced it. But I bet the convention helped people deal with it?

Yes, at the convention, its size and our shared excitement and hope thwarted that tendency. But after the convention, in small fledgling chapters, we often got into unyielding arguments between contending views where, were things further advanced, we would have arrived at more relaxed compromises or simultaneously explored contending possibilities to determine relative merits by evidence rather than by prediction.

Three thousand people attended the convention and then returned to their jobs and homes. We never knew exactly where people went, but a reasonable estimate is that 1,000 attendees became overwhelmingly committed RPS revolutionaries. Our criterion, that 1,000 of us, for our decisions was first to contribute to creating the organization and movement, and then, in context of that, to also live our lives with family and do our day jobs. Another 500 attendees, or thereabouts, became revolutionaries who were eager to really help, but who had less time to allot. And the remaining 1,500 or so became supporters with varied levels of commitment. They often called themselves revolutionary, but they had not yet changed their lives to a point where winning a new world had become the center of their way of thinking and acting.

Okay, but why did RPS persist?

Persisting meant creating a good many local chapters which could in turn work on campaigns, reach out to attract new support, further define the organization, and help existing other organizations and movements. A Catch 22 made it hard.

At the outset, the 1,000 most committed participants were the ones who would call meetings of others from the convention in our area, or of our friends, neighbors, or workmates who hadn’t yet connected with RPS. We were the people who would do most of the needed work. We were the prod and the glue. Where we were absent, nothing much happened, at least for a time. If that had been everywhere, the whole undertaking would have fizzled. But where we were present, local meetings were called, local chapters were established. Campaigns were begun. Outreach accelerated. And abetting both, the number of fully committed members grew.

What was the Catch 22?

It was that those who were most intent on success, and most essential to keep things moving, were also the most susceptible to being afraid of failing, and thus the most prone to fight over details.

So at the beginning we really had two obstacles to surmount. First, we had to depend on relatively few people to carry too much of the initial workload and responsibility. This might entrench us with too much relative power and contacts. Second, depending so much on only about 1000 people caused us to be so intent on succeeding and so averse to failing, that we often wouldn’t flexibly listen to and hear others.

We made it past those difficulties, but honestly, I believe we certainly could have failed. The enormous project that is RPS now two decades later, now well on the road to success and with nary a chance of unraveling, could have died at many points, especially in the initial period.

If you want to sing the praises of anyone for RPS succeeding, I would not nominate the famous participants, or even the initial conceivers, but the subset of 1,000 who brought to the early efforts not just great and unrelenting energy, but, also, despite the pressures, enough sensitivity and flexibility to cool down themselves and the hot tempers of others to generate sufficient room and time for enough new people to become involved so we could move from fear of failure that produced anxiety and inflexibility to informed confidence of success that produced hopefulness and flexibility. To me, that may have been the most basic achievement on which everything else depended.

Was it personally difficult for people?

Absolutely. The convention was over. There was great excitement. People went back to their homes. Now let’s say you are one of the 1,000. That is an infinitesimal number in the grand scheme of society, and truth is, I don’t know that it was 1,000. It may have been considerably fewer, or more. But however many it was, even compared to the whole world of progressive people, it was a tiny group. On average, maybe it was twenty per state, and so at most a handful in a city. That meant in many places you maybe knew two or three other people, at the very most, as energetically committed as yourself. And perhaps not even one.

So now to create a local chapter you are working yourself toward exhaustion. You believe in RPS and its potentials and you fear that the relative lack of effort by many others will torpedo it. Do you see how you could become hostile and bitter toward many? You believe that errors could be fatal, and that your commitment and still growing but already greater experience justifies your belief that your views of what should occur are much wiser than the views others offer. Do you see how you could become inflexible and even sectarian about your views?

So what do you do to ward off those quite natural trajectories, which superficially even appear warranted—and in some partial sense even were warranted?

How do you get yourself to understand that progress and success depended easily as much on the way you interacted with folks, your patience, your willingness to abide what you thought were poor or even wrong choices, as they depended on getting some abstractly right decisions made while having fewer and fewer people feeling committed to those decisions?

My guess is people had different means of getting themselves to succeed. Maybe there were some saints among us who weren’t susceptible at all to these tendencies, though I doubt it. For most of us, and this was certainly true for me, finding one or two people who would keep us honest, who would keep our priorities in order and help us deal with our hitchhikers negativity was critical. I think for many of us there was also a very conscious step, at some point, toward prioritizing avoiding these ills as one’s own special contribution. I remember myself literally pledging to myself to prioritize that. It didn’t hurt, indeed, it probably helped a lot, that there were some RPS founders and deeply involved folks who saw all this at the time, and who wrote and spoke movingly of it, even as they too struggled to avoid the pitfalls sprinkled across our paths.

I would like to ask another question, perhaps a bit personal. In those demanding times, there was a question, I am sure, for many, about family responsibilities as compared to movement desires. Post convention, while you tirelessly worked on sustaining the emerging activism, you had a young child. How did you think about this choice between family and movement? And how did others?

For myself, I remember the Trump was elected, or just a bit after, when I had my first child. Honestly, I felt strange even having a child with his persona and malevolence lurking all over society. I started to think about what it means to serve one’s family, one’s loved ones, even if we leave out, for a minute, concern for the rest of humanity.

It seemed to me that even regarding just my family, to think that the best I could do was about earning as much as possible, or, for that matter, about shielding them as much as possible from worrying about the direction of society—this is for somewhat older kids, of course—seemed to me mistaken. Don’t hear me wrong. Of course you have to provide for your children. But I now think it was likely always mistaken, a product of the atomistic competitive character of then social life, that you had to earn as much as possible, but surely when the direction of society threatened to smother and even stamp out children’s future lives, to highlight only supporting them in the commercial money-making way as if that would make all be well struck me as a kind of magical thinking. To think all will be well, one would think financial efforts on behalf of one’s family would prove to have been optimal, years later. Again, even forgetting broader social responsibility, which I don’t think we should forget, but even doing so, that view made no sense to me. It seemed to me, instead, that for one’s kids, as well as for oneself and society, one had to seek change.

I later read an interview with David Dellinger, arguably the foremost American civil disobedience revolutionary of his time, maybe any time, from decades earlier. He was asked whether he ever had misgivings, doubts, sorrows, about having spent considerable time in jail away from his kids, but, even more so, about his having not accumulated nearly the wealth he could have amassed to provide for them during their childhood and to pass on to them after he died. His reply was that he had no such misgivings, no such doubts, though he did have endless sorrow about it. He felt it was his duty to provide an image of socially responsible, caring behavior for them and also for people more generally—and he felt he had done that as well as he could, and from there on it would be up to them what road they took. He had sorrow, however, that the world was so upside down that being responsible for them and others required him devoting less time to engaging directly with them than he would have otherwise preferred. I was moved by that, and I think encountering his response pretty much completed my own thinking about the topic.

As to others’ views, I don’t know but I can guess, I suppose. I think there were over the past quarter century or so, many, many pressures for parents, siblings, daughters, and sons, vis a vis their life choices—and that there was much travail dealing with those choices. This is assuming you weren’t so strapped, so poor, so ill, that you couldn’t even consider such things as should I largely ignore society and mainly pursue my private agendas to enhance my family’s well being? Should I pay peripheral attention to social turmoil, but overwhelmingly address my own private agendas? Or should I give more time and even more so, more focus, to concerns about society, or even elevate attention to that to the prime place in my thinking? Should I shield my kids, keep my home a sanctuary of fun and internal caring, and not address society and the responsibilities it raises? Or should I bring concerns about society home, share them, and hope all will address them?

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I am certainly not saying my way or the highway. But over time, one thing is certain. If the overall trajectory hadn’t been toward the more participatory perspective, there would now be no RPS, and I think there would likely be not much future, either, and certainly not much dignified and worthy future for the families in question and even for the whole species.

As you went down that trajectory toward steadily greater involvement, were you hostile toward those who didn’t?

Sometimes I was, to my embarrassment, but mostly no. However, I did try to affect their views. I thought the objective implications of the mainly self and one’s own family oriented approach that denied need to change our choices and priorities as time passed was objectively harmful to future prospects, and that if it was dominant, it would even totally swamp away  good possibilities. So I tried to work to change such views.

But, as to being hostile, how would you react if someone replied to your suggestion that they might demonstrate, or study up, or join a chapter, or whatever, by saying—“why should I, I don’t think you stand a chance. Injustice and degradation will prevail. More, what the hell can I contribute? What can I do that would matter? I don’t think your project has a chance in hell of succeeding, but even if it does, I am sure my adding myself to it will have no significant impact. But I know I can work with considerable chance of some success to make my kids more healthy and fulfilled, my spouse, my sister, my brother, even perhaps, my closest friends. But the whole country? The whole world? Come on. I cannot impact that. It’s a fool’s errand. You are deluded. To deny my kids, my spouse, my family, my friends, to go off on that tangent. Not me.”

There is nothing irrational about that. Of course, if everyone or even most people adopted that stance it would have been a self fulfilling recipe for disaster. But one person thinking that way—whose fault was that? Was it really that person? Or was it we who understood society and history better, we who realized social needs and potentials, but had not, as yet, effectively made them compelling and believable to others? And for that matter, was the lone person making that assessment even wrong? If so, in what way? It took a kind of leap of faith to commit to the needed tasks. Luckily enough people made that leap, and then more and more. A large part of why I was so attracted to RPS, was that it acted to help people make that choice, over and over.

I said I wouldn’t get into it, but I know that you have been involved with another level of these type concerns, with addressing people’s personal, private, impediments to even acting at all, despite their wanting to? And now I know you even had to do that for yourself, as well. Can you perhaps speak to that?

Politics, social change, revolution, isn’t all ideas, nor even all ideas, action, and compassion. The ills of our society aren’t just horrible institutions to overcome and replace. They are also tendencies that get embedded in our minds. Hitchhikers in our minds. Sometimes it is called baggage. Sometimes it’s the effects of families, schooling, particular events, and so on that take on a life inside us. It is like we have a destructive enemy stuck in our minds. One dimension is stuff like racist, sexist, classist, or authoritarian habits and beliefs that hound us into doing nasty things, or, opposite, that cause us to give in to nastiness done to us. But other times, the hitchhiker inside us just says to us—and this is my own experience—“you can’t do that. You are no good, under endowed. Don’t speak, don’t act, don’t write, whatever, because you aren’t good enough.” RPS built upon but I think seriously improved upon what had gone before as far as movements addressing such baggage. It had been in past years mostly about getting rid of oppressor habits and beliefs, but rarely about getting rid of submissive habits and beliefs. And it rarely if ever got at the byproducts of all that in the form of self doubt, self denigration of the sort that blocked creativity and participation. RPS somehow, I don’t really know what caused it, got sensitive to all that. It took on raising confidence, eliminating the destructive voices that many people were held back by. It was hard. I knew my upbringing, my schooling, my relationships, had planted that voice of denigration in my mind. I would curse it, argue with it, but to get rid of it, oneself, that is hard. Somehow, though, the mutual aid and conscious focus on building confidence and aiding participation that I found in RPS helped me over the obstacles and helped me clear my mind of the baggage to make room for my best self. I do think that quality of what we were building was like a secret ally for the organization. I suppose it was a new, pretty much etherial ally, but also a powerful one.

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[Author’s Note: I hope readers will continue with this serialization’s weekly excerpts. The next excerpt’s interviewees, Andre Goldman, Bill Hampton, Senator Malcolm King, and Cynthia Parks, recall the first RPS convention and its immediate aftermath of chapter building. Which is to say they finally get into some of the nuts and bolts of seeking their revolutionary participatory society. While waiting for Excerpt 4, I hope you will find some time to use Z’s Community Forum to provide reactions, criticisms, advice, and whatever else you would like to share about this article so as to help improve the project. I also hope you will listen to the next RevolutionZ podcast episode which will offer diverse interjections of additional thoughts, questions, criticisms, reasons, and hopes regarding what you have just read.]

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