In which Barbara Bethune, Emiliano Feynman, Bill Hampton, Cynthia Parks, Harriet Lennon, and Anton Rocker discuss the initial emergence of the health front of RPS, transportation, housing, rights to the city, and early focus on minimum wage and workplace organizing.

[Author’s Note: This is the sixth excerpt from a work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This excerpt will also provide the substance for a forthcoming RevolutionZ episode. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections made by the host on hearing the material aloud. 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.]

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Health Care and Class

Barbara Bethune, you were born in 1992. You became a medical doctor and researcher and from the start questioned your role and profession. Your early RPS involvement solidified your purpose as revolutionizing health care and you later became RPS shadow Secretary of Health. Can you tell us your path to becoming a doctor, and then into radicalism, and your medical activist involvements immediately after the convention.

I became a doctor feeling it was a good way to do social good and utilize my abilities in a manner I would be good at, fulfilled at, and able to maintain. I developed the ambition early in life, partly from doctors in my family and partly from the example of a doctor who treated me at a young age.

Frustrations surfaced, however, once I entered college, and they only grew as I progressed further. My medical school training pretty much ignored context, social causes, and prevention. Experiencing the anti social and anti health aspects of an internship at a major Chicago hospital sealed the deal. I was radicalized.

Being an intern did it?

Intern training pressured us to conform so as to enter the profession. We had to jump hurdles and not create enemies among officials. For aspiring doctors this dynamic was always present. It was like water surrounding fish.

Interns did not openly question the situation. We passively took it as given. We would whine to friends away from the job, but we didn’t challenge employers. Our silence let us graduate and feel successful. But it also made us ready and even eager to impose similar insanity on others who came after us. It made us act as though internship rituals had merit rather than that they mainly enforced unworthy social relations.

We would do the rituals and defend doctors rights and privileges. We would work long hours, soldier on, earn large incomes and great status, and never think to ourselves, wait a minute, this is wrong. To allow that thought would admit our acquiescence. It was easier, and certainly better for our careers, for us to fill a slot in the system. Fulfill role requirements. Bludgeon those below. Teach them to do likewise when their turn comes. It was an assembly line of compliance.

Don’t get me wrong. I cared about patients. I had a soul. We all did. But hospital roles undercut our intentions. To become a doctor I bludgeoned those below. I sought growing income. And it was quite similar for lawyers and other professionals, I think.

But then you resisted?

Whether due to orneriness, outrageous confidence, or prior familiarity with dissidence, yes, I began to reject quiet conformity.

I asked myself, what’s going on here? Why do interns work for thirty or forty consecutive hours and then handle patients? That can’t provide good health care. To intentionally create exhaustion, that must do harm. So why compel it?

I decided it wasn’t because we would have to do that for the rest of our days, because I knew it was not how established doctors functioned and in any event it wasn’t good preparation for the occasional crises that did demand long work hours. Not to mention the main insight: why were the long hours needed? Why not just have more doctors work fewer hours?

So what was internship about?

The more I considered the question, the more I felt it was overwhelmingly about teaching conformity and limiting the number of doctors as a way to keep up doctor’s income. We needed to learn, of course, but the teaching we got conveyed medical knowledge as a kind of by-product. The core of the teaching was that we were joining a special and small fraternity of doctors, and that we had to display appropriate fealty consistent with what our future royal roles required. We had to fit or we should move on. It really was strange. We were accorded great influence and control even of our workdays, and of those beneath us, yet the price for it was to exercise our influence only in acceptable ways.

I began to see interning as sophisticated hazing. Instead of just thinking it was my lot and passively hating it, I wanted to understand it. To test my impressions, which greatly upset me and threatened my life path, and which I hoped were wrong, I even visited a military boot camp and watched new soldiers undergo training and I asked myself, what is boot camp about for them?

The answer was easy to see. It wasn’t only about learning to shoot or to work together or even to be prepared for dangerous situations. It had elements of all that, yes, of course, just like interning had elements of medical learning, but military boot camp was mainly about removing residual social inclinations, removing residual moral inclinations, and producing good practitioners of war who were ready, willing, able, and even eager to unquestioningly kill on command and to follow orders above all else. It was about further educating soldiers to raise no questions. It was about creating soldiers who could not even comprehend the idea of resisting orders, even just in thought, much less in actions.

I could easily see that military boot camp was a giant cauldron of fierce personal re-construction designed to produce soldiers who would blindly obey orders and do extreme damage without raising the slightest question. Graduates of military boot camp would accept and even celebrate having no say in policies and actions. They would report whatever few deviations might occur. Military boot camp was more about joining a cult by offering blind loyalty to its role requirements than it was about being the best you could be.

And you felt that that was true of being an intern on the road to becoming a doctor?

I know it sounds outrageous, but yes, broadly speaking, I did. After viewing the military dynamic, I looked back at interning, and I saw it was to create doctors who would defend their huge salaries and prerogatives against any challenge regardless of the health care implications for patients and for society. Yes, we were taught elements of how to provide health but only within the parameters of acceptable behavior which meant behavior that maintained incomes, abided hospital norms, and maintained hierarchies.

Interning was about creating doctors who would accept and even abet and try to gain via pharmaceutical profit-seeking, perhaps most dramatically back then by prescribing excessive opioid use. Doctors who would denigrate and otherwise keep nurses insecure and submissive to their exclusion from decisions and even to their exclusion from giving treatment they could render. Doctors who would defend their incredibly inflated incomes even unto regulating the number of doctors downward via insane medical school practices. Doctors who would do all that, and then look in the mirror, and see only the patients they did cure, not the unnecessary corpses.

Medical interning was what I later understood to be a coordinator class recruitment regimen. It was not mainly about health. It was not mainly about knowledge. It was not mainly about preparedness. It was mainly about becoming a loyal member of a relatively dominant coordinator class for a particular part of that whole class—doctors. It destroyed equity and denied fairness. It created doctors who do all this, who put up with all this, who justify and even become advocates of all this, because they see no alternative. In the world we inhabit, it all makes sense. It even seems like the only way to act. It seems the best we can be. Imagine that.

Becoming a journalist was like basic training too, I can tell you. By the time you rise in the profession, if ever, to a position on some highly respected outlet, perhaps The New York Times, or as an anchor on a big TV show, you can no longer even think, no longer even hear seriously dissident thoughts. I remember Chomsky used to point out that during the Vietnam War you couldn’t find the phrase U.S. invasion of Vietnam in any mainstream media. Later he suggested there was a reason. Socialization, training, habit, and the culture, led to people in such positions believing in essence that the U.S. couldn’t invade anywhere because it was all ours. We owned everywhere and couldn’t invade what we own.

Sort of like we heal all, so we can’t be responsible for any ill health. And yes, seeing all this made me curious about other professions so I looked and I found similar dynamics for lawyers and for many other professionals as well. Once you look, it is obvious. Training for all empowered professions conveys needed skills, knowledge, and confidence, but it also trains recipients to use their knowledge on behalf of themselves and those above but at the expense of those below. That yields promotion. That garners status. That avoids punishment. Anything less stunts or ends careers. To do your job, you had to fulfill expectations. You had to abide orders from those above and deliver orders to those below. You had to become a defender, abettor, and beneficiary of class division.

But surely doctors, lawyers, and journalists and all the rest try to be ethical…

People go through this pattern of pressure, frustration, and anger, and have varied reactions. Mostly, at least before RPS took off, doctors would try to navigate and do good and be ethical but without challenging their role assignments. They believed, with good reason, that challenging their roles would fail and would also lead to personal loss. This wasn’t true just for doctors, of course, but also for nurses, and all medical workplace employees, just like in other workplaces, as well. There is a slot for you, and you fill it.

The role structures in hospitals like those in law firms, political parties, churches, and other institutions, create an attitude go along to get along. Anything else felt like a naive pipe dream. And everyone would tell themselves ok, I am doing what I have to do, so that I can do whatever good I am able to, but when set against what could be, that was a hollow rationalization.

The worst part was that complying with your prescribed role, over and over, day in and day out, eventually switched from something you did with a frown under duress, to being who you were. You know all the lawyer jokes, well, the same could be said for doctors, managers, engineers, and so on. Complying with one’s role morphs from something we do under duress to who we are. We don’t see ourselves as monopolizing our skills. Who wants to see themselves as a thief systematically keeping others down? We see ourselves as innately better. They are down there because that’s where they belong. I am above because I belong above. It feeds on itself. It reaches a point where someone who retains sufficient humanity to resist the inequities seems either saint-like or crazy. And the same logic holds for lawyers, journalists, accountants, and all empowered workers.

For whatever reason, I reacted a bit differently than the norm for those times, as did some others, too, though we were initially a small minority and, most important, we rarely knew each other. I wanted to keep doing medicine but I wanted to improve health for everyone and not just for a tiny few. I felt no explicit allegiance to a domineering class above workers, though I certainly understood the pressures and allures of their situation.

So when I went to the first RPS convention it was mostly a kind of Hail Mary gesture. I didn’t know if what was being attempted would provide me a good path forward or even make sense at all, but I would try. And I was glad I did.

Why was that?

When at the convention, I met other doctors, nurses, and medical workers from my own city and from around the country. To hide dissent much less positive aspirations from view in medical institutions was paramount for those institutions’ maintenance—so I had never seen any of that—but once the dissent and aspirations were made public at the convention, they turned out to be much more plentiful than anyone realized. To be at the convention, where the revelations were visible, helped me see what was out there.

At the convention, we arranged and held some sessions of our own. We met each other. We empowered each other by sharing our similar stories and desires. We talked about what kinds of change we could fight for in the short term to win good gains for patients and ourselves and to awaken desires for more changes, much more, among fellow medical workers.

The ideas that gained greatest traction, as best I can remember, were seeking comprehensive single payer health care, fighting pharmaceutical companies to eliminate misuse of medicines and reduce associated financial and health expenses for society, bringing doctors to poor locales in appropriate numbers to support people in those locales to gain knowledge of their own, to empower nurses, change the income structure of the profession toward more just allocation, and agitate for national campaigns for more responsible food production and dissemination.

While I sincerely supported all of that, I became especially active in the two parts where I thought my contribution might be most helpful—trying to battle the pharmaceutical companies, and challenging the harsh hierarchies of income and influence inside hospitals.

You gotta understand, as we became sensitive about these matters, we knew it was life and death for many patients whether many doctors and nurses too would become ever more humane or more elitist and jaded. So we were seriously motivated.

For combating misuse of prescriptions, we used direct actions aimed at producers. We held rallies and sit-ins to make clear the magnitude of the problem, including the extent to which pharmaceutical companies, with complicity from doctors and pharmacists, were not only vastly over charging, but aggressively over prescribing and massively over advertising. Really, how different is that than the behavior of illegal drug cartels? But then came another revelation. The practices we unearthed were nauseating, but we were even more shocked to discover that most people found grotesque medical malfeasance unsurprising. They knew from experience what we had had to fight to recognize. It turned out that spreading the awareness of medical injustice and criminality wasn’t our key step. Our key step was convincing folks that the grotesque situation wasn’t inevitable and that we could win much better.

Everybody knew the ills?

Not the details, but, yes, people took the general situation for granted. Pointing to the shocking facts did nothing to overcome acceptance of those facts. We needed to convince people medical malfeasance wasn’t inevitable. We brought class action suits and rallied popular support. Young claimants fought misuse of mood-altering medications. Elderly claimants fought companies grabbing all their savings by entrapping them in fruitless and often horribly harmful ostensibly life-extending therapies. Those addicted to opioids fought pharmaceutical drug dealing. Everyone fought the overuse of antibiotics that risked pandemics. And we all sought free health care. The campaigns not only challenged medical issues, but also the legal system which had strict rules that blocked legal action on behalf of people not yet suffering ill effects, even if in the absence of change they were demonstrably destined to suffer them in the future.

We also worked on a national boycott by medical professionals and the broad public of the worst pharmaceutical culprits. This was to give our efforts roots in the broader society and greater power. I argued that hard as it would be, it was time to undertake a national boycott of pharmaceutical culprits. It was time to link those campaigns to larger ones about the roots of the problems in the overall medical system, polity, and economy. We had to reveal that people can not only win and preserve an immediate gain, but we can keep winning more. Medicine is a rapaciously self-seeking business. It is sick and we must operate on it. We were seriously angry.

My other focus besides all that was challenging various elitist dynamics inside hospitals and health care generally. Racism and sexism had been addressed with considerable progress, though much more needed to be done, of course. But class division, which is what most attracted my own attention, was not only previously unaddressed, but had never even been clearly raised as an issue. Medicine had become a luxury trade, rapacious and individualist.

First, we had to get people to talk at meetings. Initially it was just to discover widely held concerns and develop a sense of mutual aid. Then it was for nurses to organize for greater income, more influence, and access to more skills to help provide better care. For doctors, in contrast, it meant challenging our assumed superiority and our sense of entitlement regarding our greater power and income, and trying to support more equitable values and relations. It meant we had to support nurses and other medical workers as well as the more basic, non medical staff.

Emiliano Feynman, you became a nurse by trade. You were from the outset a very strong advocate for working class politics, and for highlighting the interface between nurses and doctors and between workers and members of the coordinator class. You have been in RPS from its inception and a pivotal figure in both its class commitments and its workplace and worker constituency organizing. I wonder if you can begin by telling us how you got involved and what were some of your early post convention activities?

During the 2020 pandemic I was run ragged, which was okay, but I also saw how little regard there was for people like me. Yes, the public applauded us, but the profession couldn’t even manage to provide us good conditions and protection. So I went to the first RPS convention as a working class nurse hostile to doctors’ elitism. I was already radical, even revolutionary, I guess, but I doubted the convention would address much less elevate my concerns. I was excited by some earlier demonstrations, but it was hard to be optimistic. Hard not to be angry. And, actually, I didn’t want to curb my anger. But I went and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Nurses were there in force to say we hate bad health care. We want better. We should be part of providing better. We should be respected. The ridiculous allotment of most power and income to owners but also doctors at the expense of nurses, technicians, and people doing other work in hospitals had to stop.

At the convention we nurses met, talked, and became more confident and empowered from sharing our views. We were excited about the program that emerged, and we quickly decided to form Health Care Workers United…a movement for better health for all, including ourselves.

After the convention, HCWU became a militant, multi focus movement to organize workplaces and win broader heath policy reforms. We investigated and learned about our jobs and their financial logic and illogic and especially about health workers’ attitudes toward their conditions. We attracted support and soon initiated positive campaigns as well as supporting unions campaigns.

But before all that, at the convention we nurses held some sessions and then invited doctors to one and at it, I welcomed them with a speech. I remember it well. I began, welcome to our session, we respect your work but feel you are overpaid, overprotective of yourselves, and overly hostile to us. Do you really think you deserve more income, status, and power than us?

And already some young puffed-up doctor screams out, “Damn right I do. Can you repair a heart? Can you breathe life into a dying child? I can and you can’t. I should earn more and you shouldn’t. I should have more say and more status and you shouldn’t. I mean, really, isn’t that obvious? How can you think otherwise?”

I stared at him, trembling and replied, “You ignore that our different tasks—and different life circumstances—give us different means to attain knowledge which in turn enforces our different income and power.”

I think I was plaintive but militant about it, and I continued, “I know many of you doctors, like lawyers and managers and others with empowering work situations sincerely believe you are properly elevated and rewarded. I know many of you really believe we workers are dumb, parochial, and should be grateful. Most of you don’t say it much, but deep down, and sometimes not so deep down, like just now, you’ve got it in there.

Many of you really feel workers should join a movement for a new society but leave its decision making to people like you. We should help you dump the old boss, so you can become the new boss. You should lead, we should follow. You should order, we should obey. And you know what, sometimes we nurses are beaten down enough that we even doubt that we can handle empowered work. Sometimes we accept that we deserve less income and say. Or if we are not submissive, sometimes we bend too far the other way and furiously want doctors kicked out of activism. Even worse, we get so angry that you bait us into denying and denigrating knowledge and skill. But other times, like now, we see that we must eliminate class division not only in hospitals but throughout society. We must welcome doctors, lawyers, and other coordinator class members into activism, into RPS, but without letting you dominate us. We see that all workers must be empowered…

And then this stagily dressed guy calls out, “if you are right, why don’t more nurses say so?”

I replied, “Because we have families to feed. Because you work us ragged. Because we fear losing our jobs. A better question is why some of us do publicly address these class issues. It’s probably because our jobs aren’t as successful as most working class jobs at disempowering us. We are subordinated like other workers, but we are less socialized into accepting our plight. Still, even once we become aware and active, we don’t want to antagonize doctors into rejecting change. So we often put a lid on our feelings. What is your excuse for keeping us down?”

Another doctor calls out, “we don’t keep you down. You are free to rise, but you just don’t get very high. I read progressive media. I don’t see this concern. Is it just you? I know lots of nurses. We get along fine. They do good work. They are happy with their situation.”

I again replied, “You don’t expect mainstream media to question private ownership because it would violate the owners’ interests. Similarly, in alternative media coordinator class rule by those who are empowered gets ignored because our media is most often run by coordinator class members like you, and due to their background, experience, and material interests, they, like you, reflexively ignore these issues. You have no idea what the nurses around you think of you, what they aspire to, what they are capable of. And, until we express ourselves, despite the risks, how could you? But then even when we do speak out, like I am right now, you are quick to contradict. Why not listen, instead?”

Emiliano, what pushed you to ever broader radicalism, beyond your own job?

General class anger and also insights about race and gender played a big role. But so did my daily circumstances. How often could I silently see the effects of pollution, monopoly-priced care, paternalistic doctoring, and bullet wounds? How often could I timidly address overdoses, obesity, hunger, and addiction? How often could I abet overuse of antibiotics and rampant hospital and pharmaceutical profiteering and not become more widely activist? Needless suffering produced by pursuit of profit made me radical, made me revolutionary, made me who I am, warts and all.

So, okay, what was your personal attitude toward doctors? What did you feel needed to be done regarding the interface between doctors and nurses?

I liked a few doctors—somewhat. Look, a doctor discussing viruses or kidneys was likely to be quite informed. A doctor discussing social programs, or even the nature of the hospital he worked in, could be just as ignorant as the next person and likely more so. The meeting we had with doctors at the  convention was repeated later in hospitals around the country. Every time the trick was to get honesty—otherwise there would be no benefit. So every time a nurse in RPS would get up, like I did, and get things rolling. We could have just met together and celebrated our joint anger at hospital profit-seeking and probably have arrived at least at verbal unity about that. But every time we nurses wanted to also deal with the severe but rarely stated class difference that existed, we would meet a wall, sometimes civil, sometimes not. Did the difference in tasks we did justify our difference in income and power? Or did the difference in tasks—and in our circumstances earlier in life—lead to differences in skills and means to attain knowledge, which in turn enforced differences in roles, income, and power? And further, did the difference in our tasks create but not justify the difference in our incomes and influence?

In each such session many people would speak. Each time it was seriously heated, and yet considerable progress was made. More, something became evident in a way that none of us had previously experienced. It wasn’t the anger, tension, defensiveness, and rationalizations. Everyone had experienced that, although often silently. It was a realization of how difficult it would be to overcome it all, but also how important it would be. It was an understanding that we had to eliminate this class division. We had to involve current coordinator class members in RPS without having them dominate RPS. We knew if they dominated the movement, they would also dominate any new economy.

Right there, that day, many nurses realized that that agenda might need to be our main contribution to RPS and that it wasn’t going to be easy. Doctors, and coordinator class members in general typically defended their advantages. They believed they were properly if not too little empowered and rewarded. They thought they helped nurses below. Many even believed nurses below should be grateful and not be in a movement seeking a better society. They saw us as too dumb or parochial. As ungrateful. They felt that while we should help a movement for a new society, we should not have much decision making say in it.

I know this wasn’t entirely new, but were nurses alone in addressing this, or had it arisen in other ways and realms as well?

This clash and associated insights had been around for ages, and had been named and discussed anew for decades, albeit always on the fringe of the broader left and barely at all in the mainstream. I think the prominent place of nurses in how this issue gained attention was because while nurses were relegated to working class subordination, our job wasn’t as successful as most working class jobs at disempowering us. Nurses’ roles included social interactions and responsibility for other people, our patients. Nurses were subordinated like other workers, but were also less socialized and weakened by our tasks. We were somewhat less prone than other workers to accept or be fatalistic about our subordination. This was true, I think, also for teachers.

Nonetheless, difficulty getting these particular issues seriously addressed was intrinsic to the topic. On the one hand, as an activist you didn’t want to alienate twenty percent of the population who have critically important knowledge necessary for social change. You didn’t want antagonize them into militantly supporting the status quo and rejecting change. This often meant we activists put a lid on our real feelings. But even when some of us would get beyond that and try to gain visibility for our views, our means for gaining wide attention was mainly public exchange of ideas—and on the left, that would be mainly via progressive media, gatherings, and conferences. But this kind of discussion of coordinator class and working class difference and conflict was incredibly difficult to initiate for public exchange.

Why?

Mainstream media doesn’t often question private ownership of workplaces. Media moguls veto that being a major topic, or even a topic at all. It just barely even comes up. Same for those who put together and host conferences and who get asked to participate. The excuse is they know the most. And it isn’t wrong only because they monopolize empowering circumstances even at the cost of working class alienation from movements. It is that it is false. They know the most from books couched in high falutin language. But workers despite being boxed out of learning and empowering options, often know more, not less, about the actual day to day circumstances, needs and feelings of actual employees. This really isn’t complicated. Self preservation of elites prevents serious focus on the structures that elevate elites. Media attention to the ills of private ownership comes from alternative media that are not owned by elites far more than it comes from anything mainstream. White run organizations aren’t very good on race, male domination of decision making doesn’t generate better or even good kin related policy. The same holds for class hierarchy.

Even within the left, even in our alternative media, pre-RPS the issue of worker-coordinator class relations was almost completely absent. The reason was broadly the same as why mainstream media almost completely excluded discussion of private ownership. People rarely welcome criticisms of themselves, particularly when it challenges their wealth and power, their position and their place, and perhaps even more so, when it challenges their self image. Since left media which was typically run by people who were coordinator class members both by their position inside the media and also their background, left media didn’t have eyes for its own classist biases.

The phenomena had existed for a long time but public attention had been nearly always minimal. However, as RPS took shape, the issue surfaced into greater visibility. This was partly due to initial RPS organizers working to bring it forward. But another factor was the earlier surfacing of this class issue in the Trump/Clinton campaign not too many years earlier.

Misplaced opposition to immigrants and blatant racism churned reactionary dissent as did anger at elites for their imposing collapsing services while they accumulated uncountable riches. Hypocritical lies from above confronted legitimate desires from below. Elites organized to deflect or crush opposition. Radicals wondered, would the final product be reactionary or revolutionary? We tried to understand how to navigate that divide.

We knew that progressive ideas and forces had for decades won serious gains along axes of race, gender, and sexuality. We hadn’t won all we wanted, of course, but we had won quite a lot. No one could stand up at a movement session of any kind and assert, or even just abide racist, sexist, or anti-trans views. But we also knew that we had achieved far less along lines of class. About class we had addressed nothing comparable in scope and complexity to the range of issues that anti racist and anti sexist activists regularly addressed.

As the 2016 election proceeded many folks faced a question. How do we explain working class support for Trump and the parallel in-effectivity of progressives at enlisting working class activism, even working class participation in campaigns and organizations, and what do we do about it?

We knew that part of Trump’s support stemmed from unwarranted fear of immigration and from racist, imperial yearnings for past triumphalism. But we also knew that another part came from workers’ warranted anger at being economically worse off than in a half century due to the greed of political and economic elites.

But Donald Trump was a billionaire and didn’t for a second deny it. Given that a large part of the anger fueling his constituency was about economic impoverishment, why were his working class supporters aggressively wedded to one of capitalism’s main practitioners of impoverishing workers?

There are videos that show Trump’s early supporters being asked what it would take for them to not vote for him. Would you not vote for Trump if he went back on some promises? If it turned out he had been a fraud in the past? If it turned out he was horrible to employees? If it turned out he has a swastika tattoo? The respondents all said no, they would still vote for him.

Okay, would you not vote for him if it turned out he had raped someone in the past? If he killed someone in public? If he said he was eager to use a nuclear bomb? The questions got steadily more aggressive because the answer, from person after person, in the deeply MAGA constituency, to the end, was no, I would still vote for him. He is my guy.

Pundits scoffed at and ridiculed this solidity of support, though when Trump won and only slightly less dramatic revelations followed, it turned out many of his supporters did hang on as they said they would. Worse, scoffing and ridiculing them fueled the tenacity of their support for Trump.

We needed to understand how Trump’s supporters could be so angry at their personal economic plight—and they were—and at media and government lies and manipulation—and they were—and yet be so steadfastly, unswervingly, and unyieldingly positive about a misogynist, lying, bigoted billionaire.

The answer that began to win attention was the idea that class consciousness was playing a big role, just not how most leftists wanted it to. The passionate distrust of and anger at elites that flowed through a good part of Trump’s supporters—and was evident as well in many other countries worldwide—was, in fact, class conscious hostility to a perceived class enemy. But the class enemy was not mainly capitalists.

Most working people never personally encounter a capitalist but they routinely encounter doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and others who have highly empowering jobs with associated status and wealth. These empowered folks compose what RPS calls the coordinator class, which is about twenty percent of the population. Workers daily serve these people, obey these people, and get meager but absolutely essential benefits from these people, though paternalistically while having to accept demeaning rules and inflated fees. We are routinely treated like children or worse by these people. And, yes, when we are talking about overall averaged-out attitudes—we typically despise these people even as we must often depend on and obey them.

Did you feel this way yourself, even now, and back then, too?

Yes, I did and I do. Absolutely. As workers we see the advantages that coordinator class members enjoy. We often want our kids to escape the family neighborhood and its local employers to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or whatever, however infrequently it could happen given society’s definitions of jobs and the hugely different conditions people encounter growing up. We tend to despise these folks, yet we want our kids to become them. Imagine the impact of that on people.

When I walk around on the streets, in the mall, going to the doctor, or at work, I don’t encounter capitalists but I do encounter coordinator class types who dress differently, talk differently, enjoy different movies and shows, and who expect working class people to move out of their way or to follow their instructions as we go about our disempowering tasks.

Workers hate being administered, being bossed around, being rendered powerless, being considered inferior and dumb, and being paternalized—but we also acclimate to enduring all that in order to get by. And acclimating has effects. After all, far more so than you are what you eat, we all become what we do.

Yes, I hate my material deprivations and my work conditions, but the group of human beings that I daily experience as at least in part responsible for and as benefitting from my personal plight, and who are often harshly derogatory and dismissive of me directly to my ears and eyes, is the group of empowered actors in the economy, the coordinator class—not the owners.

But how does seeing all that explain anything about Trump, or even more so, about what you called leftists’ relative lack of success reaching out to working class constituencies?

Trump’s voters believed that Trump had flaws but Trump himself was a good guy, friendly, and unrelentingly forthright, even though he was in fact—even if we set aside his policy views—a horrible guy, a misogynist, racist bully, and systematically incredibly dishonest. But to many workers’ perceptions, what stood out about Trump was that he didn’t masquerade. In their eyes he wasn’t a lying hypocrite. He didn’t exude academic arrogance. He shot straight. He was tough and ready to fight. He was not some hypocritical, arrogant, dismissive, snooty coordinator class type—like Clinton—who would pander to workers, talk about workers’ pain, claim to support workers, but who workers could viscerally feel just didn’t give a damn about working people, and who was so classist that it was evident in the way she walked, the way she talked, and in the very air that circulated around her, all of it so different than Trump’s walk, talk, and surrounding air, even if she hadn’t provided the additional evidence of calling Trump’s voters—which wound up being what, 60 million people—a basket of deplorables.

And, sad to say, while Trump’s supporters’ perceptions of him and their sometimes even love for him was horrendously misplaced, Trump’s supporters’ antipathy for the managers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants who typically earn many times what workers earn and who have power and influence that dwarfs and subordinates workers, and who treat workers like children or fools, and who have zero real empathy for workers but only a palpable air of their own holier than thou entitlement, was most often more than warranted.

While working class hostility to what they called PC, or political correctness, was undeniably sometimes racist or sexist, it was nearly always hostile to the class that had all kinds of rules and norms that workers must obey. Worker’s most intense hostility focused on those who used rules and fancy manners and obscure language to perch above us, to lord it over us, and to defend their class prerogatives at our expense. and this was not just true for white male workers. Nor was it confined to the worst of the coordinator lot.

With these views, some of us thought about the election well before the vote, and decided that if Sanders were running against Trump, he could and would appeal directly to Trump’s voters, and when he did that in face to face exchanges with Trump, those voters would hear him. Sanders would come across to them as caring, honest, and tough—not as a pose, but because he was in fact caring, honest, and tough. And Sanders would have had answers that Trump’s supporters really would want to hear.

In turn, in that scenario, when Sanders had won, Trump’s supporters would not have felt that they had been disregarded. Far from it, many would have wound up supporting Sanders or, if not, at least respecting and liking him. Their class consciousness of all types would still be alive, which would be a very good thing, but their hope would be aroused as well, and they would have been moving toward opposing real injustices and seeking real solutions rather than scapegoating other victims of injustice.

On the other hand, if Clinton had beaten Trump, we worried it could yield a whole different trend, even though for countless other reasons it was essential for her to win. To white working class guys, and many working class women as well, Clinton was the archetype despised, arrogant, overly academic boss. They heard her verbally celebrate solidarity, but they saw a style and manner that put the lie to that solidarity. Sexism made the hatred of Clinton more intense for some, to be sure, but even without sexism, Clinton and a good part of the population were oil and water.

Unless Clinton worked a near miracle on her substance and even more on her style, we thought working class males and many working class females too, would hear nothing she said even if she tried to communicate with them. And that was the best case. More likely, we worried she would sense their hostility and would develop a campaign that aimed for Black votes, Latin votes, Asian votes, female votes, and young votes and that basically ignored and constantly ridiculed with a coordinator-ish and paternalistic tone Trump’s supporters. And in that case, if Clinton won that way—and in the nightmarish horror show we faced, we had to hope that she would indeed win—while her victory would have kept Trump from power and would have kept the right wing machine from dominating social life, Trump’s supporters would have felt even more angry and more ready to fight than earlier. They would have been ignored yet again. And so the phenomena of right wing populism that was trending toward fascism would not have been beaten back forever, but would have only been stalled a but at the same time aggravated, pretty much as later happened when Biden won.

My point is that our thinking at the time, well before the first RPS convention and also before the Trump/Clinton vote and Trump’s electoral college victory, was already orienting us to paying great attention to coordinator/worker class dynamics in social and in movement life.

Even more relevant to what later followed, we also thought during the campaign and thus way before the RPS convention, about why progressive and radical ideas and campaigns didn’t have much greater reach inside working class communities. Why didn’t the far more accurate answers that seriously left commentators had long given about the state of white working class lives, and the far more supportive history of activity of left organizers around labor activism, resonate more with the working class than did Trump, a billionaire owner who treated workers with contempt? How could it be, we looked in the mirror and asked ourselves, that decades of organizing had left so many working class men and women susceptible to this smiling maniac?

A number of my interviewees have covered a lot of this ground…

Glad to hear that, and I hope you won’t mind that I am doing so as well. The question was old, but the context was new and urgent. One answer, rarely vocalized but very often thought, was simply that workers, especially white and male ones, but all of them, really, were just too dumb or too narrow minded or too easily manipulated, to arrive at progressive much less radical positions and commitments. Of course this explanation, whether made explicit, only implicitly thought, or even only manifested in expression and tone, was at the core of the problem. In considering this, we knew the issue was not mainly about the last six months or year. It was about the last fifty years, at least. And during that span, we realized that however discomforting it was for we activists to have to admit, our movements had often come across as not worker-aligned, not worker-identified, not worker-led. Indeed, our movements had often come across as rooted in coordinator class connections, assumptions, and values. Our movements had often had manners, style, tone, taste, vocabulary and even policy priorities dismissive of working people. And we realized this was apparent to class conscious workers even when some candidate or anti nuke organizer or campus radical or mindless ideologue said screw the 1% and champion the workers—because other choices of words, phrasing, and style on the left said, wait, I am not one of you.

We realized workers often heard from many of us, not explicitly, but in our tone, manner, and style—and sometimes even in our policy pronouncements—that we are fledgling managers, lawyers, and doctors. And that we knew it. And that even if often unconsciously, we looked down on them. We thought that worker views were dumb and tastes pedestrian and that workers needed our guidance, our instructions. Were our meetings and gatherings congenial to them, like their gatherings, or were they congenial to coordinators, infused with their practices?

Leftists talked a lot about owners and profit-seeking but very rarely showed any interest in the relation between our class, or our class to be, the coordinator class, and their class, the working class, much less any interest in eliminating that class difference entirely.

Why were so many leftists surprised, then, that our underlying reality of difference plus our dismissiveness and denigrating approach together created a gigantic impediment to unity, and indeed even to hearing one another with the slightest sense of empathy and understanding?

What was utterly remarkable, at least to my eyes, was that for decades women and blacks brilliantly revealed all the perceptiveness about relations of oppression between race and gender constituencies that was needed to see the dynamics of coordinator/worker classism. If activists had taken their ability to see the interpersonal elitism, collective cultural denigration, material inequality, and decision making exclusion typical of race and gender hierarchies, and applied it to examining the relations of coordinator/worker hierarchy, the issue would have been addressed. But year after year and even decade after decade, it didn’t happen.

This was something to consider and finally a lot of people began thinking about it, so while recognition of the importance of coordinator class dynamics had been around the periphery of left discussion for a long time, the 2016 election and those that followed and then the emergence of nurses raising the issue helped bring it to the fore so it could play a large role in the RPS convention, in our session with the doctors, and then in RPS writ large.

Barbara, as a doctor, how did you feel about nurses, then, and later?

It was hard to admit then, but now I can talk about it more easily. I was disdainful and dismissive. I paid lip service to equity and even tried to be supportive, but ultimately, reflexively, I thought of them as wannabe doctors who couldn’t make the grade. I had friends who were nurses, not unlike earlier people saying they had black friends, or even slave friends. But at bottom, I thought of or maybe more accurately just took for granted that nurses were suited only to their position. Indeed, they were lucky that folks like me were around to design for them, administer them, and care for them—and that is only if I thought of them at all which mostly I did not.

When I first encountered this issue, back at the convention, not least due to the questions Emiliano posed and the storm they elicited, I had a huge amount of trouble accepting it. I mean I can still remember Emiliano getting up and saying, “Doctors, can you see how your view hides from you the gigantic volume of our talent that is stifled to maintain your hospital hierarchies? Can you see how your advantages disadvantage us?” If society didn’t squash desires, most nurses could do some doctoring, and if being a doctor didn’t appeal to some of us, or wasn’t in our range of talents, we could do other empowering tasks. It is disgusting for society to have relatively few people do all the empowering tasks and then use their empowerment to make the rest of us believe we deserve less. And hell, we nurses are much better off than most workers

It was incredible how many notions this challenged for me, and how radicalizing the ensuing insights were. For example, it revealed the gigantic volume of talents and skills our way of setting up economic life literally had to stifle in order to sustain the existing social relations. And it revealed the incredible impact of my socialization and the effects of my work on who I was, which were things I did not want to admit.

The way I finally made myself able to really hear what was being said—and remember I was already seriously radical—was by using an analogy. I realized, eventually, just how much classism was like racism, which I had so often encountered. With racism white people had all kinds of advantages in income, wealth, upbringing, education, and so on. And they rationalized these advantages by thinking to themselves, we deserve what we have, and those other folks—blacks and Latinos—do not. We are worthy, they are not. And I saw that there is really, in the general shape of it, very little difference between that situation and what the nurses were saying they felt from doctors. I saw the similarity between what racism said to me and what my classism said to nurses. Whites are worthy, I am not. I am worthy, workers are not.

The dominant group maintains its advantages and convinces itself those advantages are warranted by denigrating the capacities and even the morality of the subordinate group. Whites did it to blacks. I, of the coordinator class, did it to nurses of the working class. It was a shocking revelation for me, and it changed me.

I began to think not that everyone could be a doctor or would want to do doctor things, but that if society didn’t squash such desires everyone could and would want to do empowering things, complex things, challenging, and uplifting things. And that most nurses, maybe all, could be doctors, but if being a doctor didn’t appeal to some, then they could do other empowering things. And I realized also that to organize society to have relatively few people do all the empowering tasks, and then to have them use their empowerment to aggrandize themselves, was disgusting. There were habits and assumptions in us that abetted that unjust outcome, but it was really unjust ways to organize work that were at fault.

It is funny to think of, and it may seem minor, but about the time all this was happening at the convention, someone played, in a musical moment, John Lennon singing “Working Class Hero.” I was visiting their house, and they put it on, and I listened, and I started to tear up. And well, at least for me, there it was. I weeped listening to him. “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, By giving you no time instead of it all, Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.” And I was part of doing that to people.

Did all this affect your views on economics more broadly?

I had briefly encountered RPS economic ideas earlier, and had scoffed at them as ridiculous. Balanced job complexes, income for duration, intensity, and onerousness of work, self management? Come on. Get serious. I was okay with the idea that owners were a drain on social possibilities. Hell, they drove me up the wall. And so, yes, I wanted an end to profit-seeking by owners and even an end to the economy being organized for what was then called the 1%, meaning the owners. But I realized later that I had seen the alternative as smart capable people like me—that was how I saw us—taking over. Owners would be gone. Great. I am a revolutionary. But workers would still be below us because that was where they belonged. They couldn’t accomplish more. It was the order of things. There was no need to think about it. Like we don’t think about the sun coming up daily. The rote worker would and should obey people like me. And I realized calling myself a revolutionary had been more than a little out of touch.

I remember a moment well along in the first convention after the meeting with nurses that so impacted me. There was a talk by Lydia Luxembourg about RPS type economics and after it ended, I walked up to her, and I said, “I am sorry.” She wondered what I was talking about, of course.

“Why?” she asked. And I answered, “For years now I have dismissed as silly and impossible your kind of economic vision. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t evaluate it. I just ignored it. I dismissed it without engaging it. And I now realize that the underlying reason I did that was my own class position, my own class interests, and the biases and assumptions that they gave me. So I am sorry for that.”

The speaker, Lydia, said how she had never heard anyone acknowledge that so directly before, and she thanked me for doing so. She also said we are all twisted and fed by our upbringings, schooling, and social roles, and it is no sin to imbibe elitist or submissive habits—it is only a sin, once we see what we have become, to cling to such habits after we understand them. Well, I stopped clinging, and in time I also let the guilt go. A big issue for me, though, was how to talk about this stuff, how to address it in ways that could be heard, would be heard, and would move us forward.

I have heard you have a kind of rare disability, I think it might be termed, and I wonder if you mind if I ask what it is, and whether it has had any impact on your political commitments?

It is true, I do, yes. It is even a little hard to describe and people often don’t believe it. You see, I have no mind’s eye, or ear, for that matter. It wasn’t until sometime around 2014, I think, that this condition had a medical name, and since sometime thereabouts it has been called Aphantasia. I can’t see anything inside my head—nothing but black. I see with my eyes okay. But I can’t put a number in my head and see it there much less put two numbers there, like you would on a piece of paper, and then add them in my mind that way. I can’t even see a triangle in outline, much less a blue or a green triangle, much less a scene that I have experienced, a memory of a place or person, or anything that I might imagine. Really, just black.

And it isn’t just images that I can’t put in my head, though that is most striking, I suppose. I also can’t experience, say, an odor—a smell—in my mind, or more dramatically I can’t hear sounds either, no music playing in my head. I look at you, I see you. I even recognize you. If you looked different than yesterday, I would probably know. But if I turn away, I cannot see your face in my mind, much less remember and see it tomorrow or next week or in two years other than by looking at you again. I can see you a thousand times, and the same thing holds. I can listen to music, hear it, love it. But I cannot play it back later, in my mind. I can sing along, when it is playing and if you change the lyrics or the sound of it, I will know, but I cannot hear it in my mind when it isn’t playing. I can recognize familiar people, for the most part, well really familiar people, anyhow, but I cannot see them in my mind. This has lots of effects, at least in my case, especially it cripples my memory.

But the thing that is most striking, or it was most striking to me, anyway, and the part that then impacted I think my politics a little when I realized it, is that I didn’t know that I was different in this regard—I think it is maybe 2 percent and perhaps a little more who are as I am, though maybe less since my case is particularly extreme—until I was about sixty. I can’t explain and I don’t even know the different ways that I do things that you do with your mind’s eye. Once I became aware of the situation, I spent considerable time asking folks what they could do, to get a feel for what I couldn’t do. But then I realized something amazing, at least to me.

I had deluded myself for decades. That is, if you look at TV and movies, read fiction, pay attention to sports, and so on, there are countless indicators that people have and use a mind’s eye. I was or I think I must have made myself oblivious to all of that. I suppose a deep desire to be normal and certainly not markedly different than normal caused me to ignore all the signs of my deviation from normal. I could ignore them because I could operate so that nothing was apparent. But still, I was censoring my perception to maintain my self image as being healthy like everyone else. What I learned from that was the incredible power of unstated and even unperceived agendas to bend my thoughts and perceptions. Due to seeing how delusion could afflict me too, I got more tolerant of the phenomenon of self delusion, which is often caused by things entirely different than biology, such as by defending personal choices, personality, or ideology.

And I learned, as well, another thing. Not your topic, I guess, but what might be the range of attributes that people have? I mean here was a really large difference, and it was for a very long time not even known to exist, not named, not perceived even by those who had it, like me. So, how many other big qualitative differences are there in the mental apparatuses that different people have? I mean we all know we are born with different eyesight levels, or different voices, different mental abilities, and so on. But it seemed to me, where there is one thing that has gone unstated, unrecognized even, there are probably many more things that vary greatly among people and I don’t know what to make of that observation, even now.

Finally, Barbara, I have been asking folks if they could tell us an event or campaign that particularly moved them personally, during the emergence of RPS, so, can you please?

You might think it would be something in my broad area, for example, the inspiring and very effective pharmaceuticals campaigns and protests or the hospital occupations. And of course those, and many other health related events and campaigns did powerfully affect me. But the truth is I am and have long been a fan of movies and Hollywood, so I have to admit attending the movie Next American Revolution and then later enjoying the famous Oscar presentation and then most of all, the subsequent Hollywood Strikes left me incredibly inspired.

I think it was partly admiration and just my general interest in all things film, but I suspect it was also the incredible class dimensions of it, including addressing matters of coordinator/worker division and job definition and my feeling, while admiring it, that we ought to be able to do as much, if not more, in the health area. I suspect that I wasn’t the only medical person dramatically moved, and, indeed, I don’t think it was an accident that the Hospital Renovations Movement came just a couple of years after the Hollywood Strikes.

Emiliano, health care is partially about what goes on in hospitals, but it is also about the companies that provide medicine, and about how the rest of society’s institutions produce health or illness. What were some of the early inclinations about each?

Well, the class revelation, and of course long standing broadly similar insights about race and gender, played a big role. The truth was you couldn’t be in a hospital and daily see the horrendous denial and deprivation and not either insulate yourself from feeling anything much—which was the accepted approach, and which was also understandable as a way to try to function—or feel outraged and then move on to try to change things.

After all, how often can you see the effects of pollution and carcinogens, of over priced care and of warranted hostility toward authorities offering care, of guns and shootings and gangs and drugs, of hunger, of diseases empowered by profit gouging pharmaceutical prices, and of misuse of drugs for the mind and of antibiotics and pain killers, and not lose focus and plunge into depression or become active in opposition—unless you blocked yourself from feeling, which, of course, while it would allow you to function privately and personally as a doctor, writ larger would simply add to the context that produces all the ills.

I once went to India, back at that time, actually, I think a bit earlier, for a gathering. I was in Mumbai traveling around with a very well known Indian revolutionary activist. We were driving somewhere, I don’t remember the destination, and it felt like beggars were coming into the street at every stoplight seeking help. It was a horrible sight—they were talented at their calling and would routinely send the worst off among them—or at any rate the one who looked worst off—to accost the foreigner, which was me.

As we travelled through the city, I was getting more and more depressed and distressed by all the pain, but my host was carrying on as if there was nothing happening. So I finally asked how she could stand it. She told me she had to become literally blind to it. She had to not see it, not feel it. She had to tune it out, turn herself off to it, and continue on her path. And I could see that it was true. She did have to do that or the pain and sheer magnitude of it all would immobilize her. But of course most who took that route to sanity developed a creeping and creepy coldness of the spirit and soul. Cultivating an ability to look away could spread and congeal into outright dispassion. It could become anti-social or worse. My activist escort was a rare exception, but her traveling a vastly better path didn’t negate the observation.

Another time I was talking with a prominent activist from the New Left era who told how in subsequent decades he was not able to retain the degree of sensitivity and openness to reality he had felt earlier. He explained that in the Sixties and early Seventies he could act on his feelings, he could do things consistent with his extreme agitation and anger, so he tuned in to the reality around him, he turned on to his full sense of human empathy, and he adopted the militant radical path of the day which let him express his anger and desire fully. But later, that outlet was severely reduced. He could be dissident, yes, but to express the scale of outrage and the level of solidarity he had allowed himself to feel earlier would not resonate or be productive, and not being able to express it, he couldn’t let himself feel it. So like the activist in Mumbai, he too had to curb his empathy.

When I thought about those examples, I realized, we were barely different in my hospital. The pain and suffering constantly at hand bred a similar self censoring of emotion, human solidarity, and outrage so we could be medically effective amidst all the pain. I saw that this censoring of sensitivity made perfectly good personal sense to avoid dissolution of one’s sanity and to be able to function, but I also saw that writ large self-censoring our sensitivity was a powerful system-sustaining choice.

What overcomes this vicious dynamic is only massive activism that creates a context that permits real and full sensitivity to emerge and grow. The early movements around health and around RPS health program, began to ask very simple questions. Which policies, behaviors, habits, and requirements in society caused people to be unhealthy? What changes could improve the situation as well as lay groundwork to go further? And that worked wonders.

From the opposite direction, this brings to mind, at least to my mind, imperial soldiers, even typical police, even leftists too often, ignoring the humanity of those they wind up fighting against, even seeing them as subhuman, to facilitate getting on with their military, police, or even rebellious tasks. Call them pigs, call them vermin, so as to better attack them. I think it is very similar indeed.

Be that as it may, in the health realm, next came various boycotts of unhealthy products and their manufacturers. Then we took up demands about pharmaceutical prices and their courting doctors and pharmacists to write and fill excessive prescriptions, and we addressed related doctor policies as well. We took up single payer health care, and initiated mass campaigns to provide excellent health care in rural and low income regions, in the treatment of children in schools, in pre school programs, and in diet.

The National Nurses March in 2027 was a pivotal turning point. 200,000 nurses marched in Chicago and no one knows how many more did one day strikes and marches all around the country. The speeches and supporting teach-ins set the tone for much of the substance of ongoing health- and hospital-related activism. I can’t put into words the feelings of empathy, anger, hope, and desire that accompanied and fueled that march. And in tune with those feelings and as all these efforts began to generate very wide support, we began campaigns in medical schools to revamp curriculum and behaviors, and in hospitals to overthrow the idea of interning as a kind of boot camp. It was rapid, exciting, and of course led to much more in years to come.

Can you tell us of a very personally pivotal event for yourself, over the years?

What comes first to mind isn’t something I talk about much, nor was it particularly pretty—but, well, okay, I guess so. RPS was becoming prominent. It was, I guess, 2026 or 2027, sometime around then. I was at work, doing my job, but also, of course, at every opportunity talking about politics and RPS with other employees, and especially with nurses but also sometimes doctors, and even patients.

So one day I went to lunch in the cafeteria and I happened to sit with a doctor, a hospital psychiatrist/ who I knew pretty well because my main interest and most of my nursing work was related to issues of mind. We had worked together, often, with no overt issues between us that I was aware of. At any rate, we got talking, and it got very heated. He took great offense feeling that my views implied he was insufficiently aware of and concerned about the well being of various others, and particularly his being classist toward working people, both in general and even among patients.

We weren’t literally talking about him, or even about such relations in general, but about widespread attitudes to some specific campaigns outside the hospital. I don’t think I actually pushed his buttons at all intentionally, certainly not aggressively so, but what mattered was he took it that way. And, honestly, if we had a video of it, I later felt, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my tone or facial expressions or whatever revealed anger at, and even worse, a kind of dismissal of things he was saying about RPS campaigns, due to my seeing his words as classist. I say that, because I am confident I did think just those thoughts, and so it was probably apparent. 

Well, at one point he flew out of his seat and across the table, literally leaning on it to hold himself up while shouting in my face. His nose couldn’t have been more than a few inches from mine. He was livid and I actually thought he might physically attack me. He went on for a considerable time, making all kinds of claims about me as a person being purely mental, uncaring, manipulative, and controlling, and also about him being a caring person.

Well, without belaboring, afterwards I thought a lot about it. Partly I was concerned to figure out how to communicate about issues of coordinator class working class relations and attitudes without so polarizing folks who my views contradicted that my efforts unintentionally curtailed possibilities of useful exchange. But partly, I also wondered how a trained psychiatrist, someone who routinely had to maintain their calm in difficult situations, could get so wild over any affront at all, much less over a pretty indirect one.

What I took from it is the intense power behind our being moved to defend our views of ourselves, and the potential of that power to subvert reason and even history and connections. And also, I admit I felt that this friend actually would not have been remotely as upset if what I had said was in his own view ridiculous, as compared to it being, as he heard it, regrettably plausible. But this meant a person closer in viewpoint about, say, coordinator class and working class relations, and already at least somewhat able to see and understand the issues, could become oddly even more polarized and hostile than a person whose views were much less aware. I suspect a lot of people in RPS could tell similar stories, and I hope we all learned from them. RPS history says maybe we did.

Housing, and Rights to the City

Bill, one thing that emerged early in RPS was attention to urban life with one focus being transportation. How did that occur, and what were its early features?

This eventually had many aspects, but I think it started with concerns about urban travel. Did such travel have to be undertaken by fossil fuel to the detriment of ecology and health, or could we do better?

Even before RPS, I visited various European countries where the use of bicycles dwarfed their use in the U.S. The benefits of bikes were more exercise, less noise, cleaner air, a more social experience, greater cost effectiveness, and even reduced time of transit because while a bike is a ridiculously slower vehicle than a car, cab, or bus in an open area, inner city crowding often slows fueled vehicles so much that they are slower. Not to mention the time we waste getting fuel and hunting for parking.

The obvious question was, if urban bike transport would be cheaper for consumers, better for ecology, healthier for all, and even an overall time saver—why was it almost completely absent? The answer was that fossil traffic including selling vehicles and fuel to nearly everyone was an immensely profitable part of the economy. It was habitual and hard to jettison even if it had become an irrational suicide machine for society.

Bicycle enthusiasts and urban planners got together and RPS supported their efforts seeking massive increases in inner city bike lanes and, ultimately replacing the smog systems of the past with improved mass transit plus bikes and walking.

Like many RPS changes we have sought, even when we were just getting going increasing the use of bikes was almost impossible to rationally oppose. The only non hysterical criticism was to say we already have cars and buses. Elevating bikes will interfere with what is already predominant. We should avoid disruption and its ensuing ripple effects.

Of course, the minute we asked whether long run health and well being provide good reason to accept short run transitional disruption, resistance from anyone reasonable fell apart. All that remained as a motive to oppose transition was that some elements would lose profits and power or otherwise be disrupted such as owners of and perhaps even workers in industries that would decline. So all we had to do was find ways to proceed that did not hurt innocent people.

This was the pattern with virtually every RPS agenda item. In each case we sought to enact desirable changes but always in ways sensitive to those who didn’t deserve losses but who would suffer if the changes occurred and their situation was not attended to. Which did not mean, I should say, that we should worry about rich elites becoming less rich. That was of course  another benefit.

At any rate, the early discussions of transportation and our early transportation program were mainly about expanding urban bike transport while reducing autos and expanding efficient, quiet, comfortable, publicly supported mass transit.

For the long run, the more interesting aspect was the interface with a “rights to the city” consciousness that arose much earlier from the developing world. This was a movement advocating that we design cities and regions not for elites to profit, but for citizens to enjoy.

Indeed, “rights to the city,” was not only about bikers, pedestrians, and clean air, but also rights to food and housing, free migration, free education, a healthy environment, ample public space, political participation, and social non discrimination. Rights to the city was RPS program applied to urban areas. Symmetrically, RPS program was rights to the city applied universally.

Cynthia, you got involved with RPS while coming out of prior activist work. Can you tell us what that was, and what drew you into RPS?

My family lost its home when I was ten years old. Many people we knew lost their’s too. I was young, but I saw not just what was totally obvious, that families of four, five, six and more had to live in one and two room ramshackle flats, or that two or more families had to move in together in a home that was too small for either family alone, or that people had to live in a car, as my family did for two years. At times I had rats for roommates. I felt incredible tension and saw unforgettable anger, despair, alcohol, drugs, and violence. Life was seriously harsh. But as I got a little older I met folks who devoted themselves to preventing evictions for inability to pay mortgages or due to vicious development projects raising rents to clear out whole neighborhoods, and, in cases where preventing evictions proved impossible, I met people who devoted themselves to helping those victimized find livable new homes.

The contrast between these activists who sought just results, and the real estate developers, bankers, and police who callously carried out evictions and arrests, was so stark for me that it pretty much dictated the course of my life.

And your turning toward RPS…

Within a short time of starting to organize alongside housing activists my understanding broadened even while my energies remained focused on housing. I understood that the guys dumping household contents onto the street weren’t the core problem, nor were even the bankers foreclosing on mortgages, nor the cops, legislators, or real estate developers. Oh they were each of course part of the problem and while some showed remorse, most acclimated themselves to their roles. But the core problem was a system of requirements that propelled people into these behaviors. That system was my deeper enemy. I was already a revolutionary because I not only despised that system, I also felt that despite all the deprivation and depravity that I had already seen, people could do much better.

So, when I first met various RPS organizers, it was a perfect fit. I didn’t have to change my focus. I only had to welcome support from others and lend my support to them.

In fact, I quickly realized that in some ways I was more prepared to contribute to RPS than many of the people who were already in it. After all, the bond between a housing organizer and a potential victim of eviction who will become a housing organizer too, and then between the potential victim turned activist and others in similar circumstances, was a model for RPS reaching outside its base of members.

Housing organizing required listening, hearing, and empathizing as much as any activity I knew of. It entailed consciousness raising, skills development, confidence building, and informed, tireless solidarity for and from everyone involved, all in incredibly intense circumstances. It required collectively conceiving and sharing creative solutions. You had to pay close attention to means at hand and to means attainable. You had to be patient with people and impatient with institutions. It involved exactly the type of activism RPS needed. And what we housing organizers needed back from RPS was the power and continuity of a large scale organization willing to support us. A perfect fit.

Cynthia, What about personal difficulties joining RPS?

Activists I first encountered had lots of education and were comfortable and appeared confident. They expected rural folks who looked, dressed, and talked like me to defer to them. It was ingrained habit. That made me unsure and hurt, but also angry. Luckily some folks tried to not just welcome me but to learn from my ways of relating. My redneck activist friends who used gun culture to reach into rural communities horrified some lefties but it taught others new ways to reach out. Seeing that made me realize that I could and should contribute. The hardest part was always arousing from others, and even from myself, allegiance to something far beyond the immediate moment.

Harriet, you became a grassroots organizer of extreme effectivity to the point of also being a trainer for other organizers. You started your activism in local communities fighting evictions and, at the same time, developing consciousness of housing issues that later merged into larger scale demands and campaigns. You became very active, in particular, with food organizing and delivery, a protector and advocate of the defenseless. But you got involved in the housing issue a bit later than Cynthia, is that right, and initially with a different focus?

Yes, as the previously local housing campaigns around the country started to grow and entwine by becoming connected with RPS and through RPS with many other projects, I was in school, thinking about social change but not seeking it. And for whatever reasons, I began to wonder about housing. I think it was initially as much me wondering is there a career there, as it was anything more social.

First, I wondered, what could anyone do about the living situation in large apartment complexes? Everyone was fragmented. There were few or no shared agendas. Landlords dominated renters. There had to be local options worth pursuing.

Second, I wondered if some broad national policy could increase affordable housing in ways equitable for families and exemplary regarding housing production.

What followed?

I and a group of friends started meeting to discuss ideas, and also to visit housing activists and tenants rights groups to learn from them. We encountered many people already in or about to join RPS so I and my friends joined too.

So it wasn’t some major life decision to angst over?

Not even remotely. Rather, we were sitting around talking, and we noted that the people we liked and appreciated were in RPS. We knew broadly what it was about, so we joined. Just like that RPS’s proximate short term benefits attracted us.

And then?

Two plans for helping people escape from homelessness and weakness into homes and influence emerged from our talks and were then supported by housing activists and caught on as RPS programs.

The first was a massive expansion of organizing in apartment complexes. The idea was to get renters to see themselves as a collective force able to take steadily more direct control of their circumstances.

This campaign involved many steps. At the outset an organizer or two from RPS would visit an apartment complex, make friends, and hear about issues and problems. She would make tentative suggestions to understand their merits or debits. Typically a few gains were made before others. Sometimes elderly tenants would be on a high floor that they had difficulty getting to and from, and an apartment swap in the name of fairness would occur. Younger more able folks from a more accessible floor would change places with elderly folks on a less accessible floor. Such simple self-organized events showed sympathy and that we could seek overall fairness. This changed people’s sense of potentials and their moods, too.

How did you get folks to do it?

In my experience, such achievements are more a matter of trying at all, than of overcoming great obstacles. In this case, we started by reaching out to younger student tenants in places where one or more tenants were already in RPS. The truth is, though, that modern life is so fragmented that even a current tenant was typically only marginally known by other tenants. Still, before long we approached families. A bit of modesty, a bit of social engagement, a lot of listening—that was the path. Not easy, but not impossible.

Gains where residents themselves could enact improvements were excellent because they quickly revealed potentials. Sometimes we sought aesthetic changes in corridors, paint and the like. Once we had some trust and excitement, we helped people set up tenants’ food coops to ease people’s time spent shopping and reduce costs, and we helped set up collective approaches for handling daycare and even laundry. Freeing people’s time was crucial to pretty much all gains. Folks who worked double shifts and cared for kids couldn’t participate unless doing so freed up time. It was slow going but after awhile people realized sharing could work and then we started having parties and social events. New friendships formed. After gaining more trust, if present we began cautiously addressing drug use, alcoholism, and spousal abuse. Not to blame, but to help. For the first time, people talked publicly about personal violations and worked together to reduce them.

There eventually arose the idea that perhaps tenants didn’t always each have to own things that they would only rarely use but that were important to have available when the need arose. Perhaps people could share. It was a little like setting up a lending library, but not only for books. Car pooling grew. Such efforts not only saved time and money, they built social ties and trust which paved a path toward future greater gains. Optimism became infectious. Helping each other, mutual aid, became part of daily life.

Did you do this type of work?

Yes, I was a tenant and organized in my complex. My being a resident made it easier but there were plenty of apartment buildings with RPS member residents. So my situation wasn’t all that unusual. Still, it didn’t come easily for me. I wasn’t the kind of person who goes into a room and immediately relates to everyone. I didn’t quickly create bonds. I was more like most people. Shy, quiet, and not well suited to talking with folks I didn’t know.

Add to that, again, very sadly, that like most women I had had grave misgivings about knocking on doors, having a man answer, and going in to talk. But I knew how much it might matter, so I did it. Not wonderfully, I would say, but well enough—though typically whenever possible we went door to door in teams, especially for first encounters, though going back sometimes meant going one on one.

Not least because of such worries, a whole different dimension for attention arose in many living units once there was some trust among residents. Safety and dealing collectively with reducing drugs and sexual and spousal abuse became a focus. The idea that people could publicly talk about such horrible personal phenomena and collectively take steps to reduce such violations was at first inconceivable. Yet finding solutions to simple issues did slowly morph into giving attention to more complex concerns.

As collectivism and mutual aid developed, the need for local governance began to arise to adjudicate disputes, allocate resources, and to win lower rents and timely repairs.

Writ larger, we realized an apartment complex was a small society amidst others, like a neighborhood was amidst other neighborhoods, or a town, city, or even country was amidst other towns, cities, and even countries. And for that reason to have well established housing activists get closely connected to RPS was incredibly valuable both as a means to learn of successful choices in other complexes which we could emulate but also to get for direct aid.

Didn’t you also get involved in broader national campaigns?

Yes, we wondered how we could build high quality, affordable housing in non exploitative and exemplary ways, and with exemplary distribution. Who would do the work? Why would they do it? With what financing? Who would get the product?

As our group discussed such questions we thought about enlisting participation from people who were currently doing little of social value and who themselves had related needs and capacities. We thought about building new housing in a manner seeking to be just, equitable, and uplifting for all involved. We thought about housing going to those in need.

It came down to looking for places where large numbers of capable people were available to build new housing at little loss for current other contributions.

This was the beginning of the RPS focus on transforming military bases and prisons to socially useful pursuits. Why couldn’t soldiers, guards, and inmates too construct low income but high quality housing. Instead of learning how to kill with blind discipline in the military, and instead of learning to job the system and gain more advanced criminal skills to use after release from prison into a society that stigmatized their reentry and often made stealing their only real work option? Why couldn’t soldiers and inmates learn useful skills, cooperate at work, and make their own decisions while generating a much needed product? Indeed, why not let soldiers and inmates, once they left the military or prison, have first claim on houses they had helped build even as other new houses would go to young people, homeless people, and others in need? We had to house so many people escaping climate induced flooding, why not give them real homes?

This was a national program that had to be won from government so organizing began partly in communities, and partly inside the military and jails. RPS members reached out to families, to people working with those constituencies, and via our own people to others inside, as well as to neighborhoods around bases and prisons, and to poor communities.

This was tumultuous, as we all knew it would be, but it also had so many benefits that we didn’t even have a good grasp of that until later.

Can you give a feeling for what some of the interactions were like?

Sure, it would often go more or less like this. A soldier, incredulous would say, “You want military bases and prisons to construct housing? You must be delusional or living in some other world.”

I might have said, “Yes we want that, exactly, and why not? Having cleaning brigades for underserved neighborhoods would be good too, but imagine building housing not only for migrants and for homeless folks from the surrounding communities, but also for soldiers and inmates themselves to enjoy, once they leave the military or prison.”

Going a step back, when did you become radical? What caused it?

Me personally? At nineteen, in community college, I heard progressive talks about racism, sexism, and global warming. I was sympathetic, but it seemed to me to lead nowhere. And there was so much anger, so much in-fighting. I was more into music, movies, and social media.

One night I was talking with a friend in her room and she turned out, to my surprise, to be very radical. She had these posters of Beyonce but also Angela Davis. I remember she said, “The Wall Street march was great but we obviously need more, including on our campus.”

I said, I am embarrassed to admit, “Come on. That will never happen.” “Why not?” she said. “Why assume indignity? Why endure harsh circumstances? Why not seek change?”

And I replied, “Are you serious? I assume harsh circumstances because the world is harsh and thinking it doesn’t have to be that way is deluded. I am not cynical, I am aware. You are deluded.”

She wasn’t impressed. She said something like, “As a biologist would you assume cancer was incurable at the outset of seeking health? As an engineer would you assume a bridge couldn’t span a river at the outset of trying to connect cities on either side? Why do you assume oppression is forever? Why do you favor failure? Do you fear success?”

I wondered, was I jaded? Did I see the social glass half empty despite that it was really half full? That one talk with a friend whose name I can’t even remember turned me around. Where would I have wound up without it? I don’t know. But with it, in a semester I went from aggressive cynicism to cautious optimism. And then I joined RPS. She got to me, even if I didn’t admit it then. I don’t know why, or even how, I guess, but she did. There is no single recipe for radicalization.

There was another campaign, wasn’t there, which came quite a bit later, focused not only on buildings that were already apartments, but on motels and hotels?

Yes, we realized the number of empty rooms in hotels and motels, on average, at any moment, was about the same as the number of homeless people throughout the country, about 8 million back when we first addressed this. It was a pretty incredible fact.

So we thought about that and decided to build a campaign around the idea that everyone should be housed—-a full housing campaign, sort of like a full employment campaign—where people could occupy empty dwellings that were not their own, simply while visiting somewhere. This started by saying that all buildings that provided temporary housing to travelers should allot 20% of their rooms to permanent residents at a low income rental rate. There were lots of details, but the guiding idea was clear enough. Luxury for a few had to come after necessity for the population as a whole. Of course, later, everything about hotels, motels, and income for housing would change as RPS progressed and more housing was built, not least by soldiers and prisoners, but short of that, as with other RPS campaigns, the partial opening of various private motels and hotels to low income residency bettered the circumstances of deserving constituencies and elevated values and practices that prepared for winning still more advances.

Finally, all these housing approaches had a great synergy that was often typical of RPS programs. They benefitted the people doing the activity. They benefitted the recipients of the products. They benefitted society writ large. And they strengthened various constituencies with skills, dispositions, and interconnections suited to winning still more gains as time proceeded.

Can you remember some pivotal moment or moments during the emergence of RPS that greatly personally affected you?

Many, but here is one. It was during my time tenant organizing. I called on an elderly couple in my building to ask if they would be interested in very carefully swapping apartments with someone from the first floor so they would no longer have to walk up three flights to reach their apartment. They looked at me, this was after getting me some tea and cookies and while we were sitting, and the gentleman just wept. The woman explained that for two years going up and down stairs to their apartment had been a kind of torture. It was worse for her husband, which meant he did it much less often, but also quite bad for her. He had worked assembly and his legs were bad. She was, as she put it, tired lungs on tired legs.

So we talked and they told me about themselves and vice versa. But the part that so moved me was that they were utterly incredulous that it had never even occurred to them to see if anyone would make the switch for them. And they felt interested, as well, that no one had ever spontaneously offered, yet now they saw there was no insurmountable reason for a caring person not to offer. After all, here it had finally happened.

I took from it not just new close friends and the pleasure of having helped people, but a deep understanding of the incredible extent to which society twists us all so far from simple levels of human sympathy and respect that we then take for granted incredible callousness and atomistic isolation. It isn’t even malicious. It is more like habit. Suffering is just how it is. We don’t even admit it’s happening. We endure or we shimmy by it. But you know, when we mentioned elderly tenants stuck on a high floor, younger tenants on lower floors did offer to swap. Then in a Sunday afternoon, with others helping to move furniture and the like, with no opponent to overcome, people’s lives would change.

I realized that to overcome the near universal assumption of inevitable isolation and passive acceptance of what was often insanely harmful would be central to having strong activism, and that even an act like switching rooms could foster strong connections and spur important consciousness raising. This wasn’t reading a leaflet or even a book, it was living different.

We reached out to student tenants and also to high school kids in buildings where one or more residents were already in RPS. Next, we approached families. We were modest but also eager. We listened. One word by us, five by them. One by us, five by them. We had to choose our words well. And we had to hear theirs, to heed theirs, even better.

But look, I am relaying successes and I may be giving an impression it was all easy. A cakewalk. It wasn’t. Let me just recount a couple of experiences that shed light on the difficulty, which wasn’t a function of complexity, of lack of understanding, or anything like that. One time I was urging participation, it happened to be about trying to win better relations in a housing complex. I said something like “join us, fight for better.” I doubt I will ever forget the reply: “Why? You don’t stand a chance. Injustice always wins. Anyhow, what could I do? How could I matter? Maybe I can make my family more healthy and fulfilled, but the whole building? The whole country? To deny my kids, my family? Just to lose? Not me.” I remember my reaction, too. For my neighbor to be so defeatist…to have such a narrow focus—I felt it was my fault for not conveying hope. But how could I, I wondered at the time? Did I myself even hope? In those early days, RPS also lacked confidence, or at least I sure did. Who were we to undertake such tasks? Nights of sleepless doubt followed days of stumbling error. Too few people had too much work.

One more experience. In school, senior year, I and some friends, all activist, lived off campus in a low income area. We made friends with some local high school kids. Their desperation was so palpable. Drugs were their crutch, both to escape and to earn. Gangs were their defense.

Tt got so we could see that they were drugged at times. One of us asked, one day, “you know I can see you are drugged. What is it? Why do you do it?”

Our friend replied, “It’s glue—we sniff it, or sometimes it’s paint thinner. We do it to escape pain.” We were shocked, Glue? “That stuff destroys your brain cells. It will make you unable to think, unable to be creative at all,” we urged.

And how could I forget being told, “You think we don’t know that? We do, of course. But what do we need big brains for? To pack bags at the Food store? To obey some manager’s orders? We would rather escape. We aren’t losing anything we can use…”

I didn’t know how to help. Honestly, they were making a conscious choice. I had read how a famous French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, had taken what was called speed for years to have more time and energy to write. When he was asked why he would do that given that it would take years off his life, he replied he was happy to trade relatively unproductive years at the end for making the present more productive. Not so different…and yet oh so different.

So then I had an idea… and I told them, “Okay, I get it, but you know that stuff will make you unable to have sex…”

An incredible experience…

More instructive than anything I ever learned in college, yes, and the story worked as best we could tell. But I had made it up. It was so manipulative. There had to be a better approach. In any case, around that time we visited tenants’ rights groups and met many RPS members. I liked them and hated what I saw around me, so I joined. I was unlearned. Joining was not a big deal. It felt right so I tried it. And my life changed. And the accommodations to survive that our neighbors made, well, I started to realize everyone I knew made accommodations and overcoming all the derivative baggage was going to always be central.

Cynthia, another interesting early project involved transportation, right?

Yes, the campaign for bicycles before cars had as its logic ecological benefit, safety, and also improved urban social relations. The case was open and shut. On no grounds was inner city travel by auto superior to travel by bicycles plus mass transit. What was interesting was not so much the argument for this transition as the argument against it, and the process by which our support grew.

Those against had to ignore—or concede—that bike transit was more economical for those doing it, faster when mass transit also exists, and clearly, writ large, vastly better for ecology. But they argued that cars exist and we like them and feel secure in them, and we don’t want to be told we can’t use them, or that we are doing something evil by using them. You have perhaps heard some of this from others…whatever. This is my experience of it.

At the beginning, the bike proponents kept hammering on their own logic and largely ignored the feelings of the car advocates, or chalked them up to ignorance or selfishness. The car advocates characterized the bikers as deviants with no hope of success who were interfering with a working system in pursuit of something that would never happen.

A break came when the bikers started to listen and respond to what the car owners were saying. The arguments now took the form of here is an option that you might actually benefit from, and your kids and grandkids will certainly benefit from. Why not give it a limited chance, to see if it has merit? We can all learn from that. And with that non-confrontational and cautious orientation, bike lanes began to spread and grow in use. And then some roads were made car free, at first just for a day or two a week, and then more. It was all experiment. It was all let’s see what’s possible, what the benefits and costs are.

Bike dealerships spread and bikers realized this was an area that could also be made less commercial. And then things got really interesting. Bikers took on auto manufacturers to seek more efficient electric vehicles and also for auto plants to produce bikes in large numbers for purchase by cities to be made available on a sharing, free basis to inner city users.

Of course there were plenty of conflicts along the way. Including hostile face offs, fights, and even some huge brawls when cars clashed with bikes or vice versa on the streets. But once the bikers became open to real discussion, and saw their path as actually converting folks’ views rather than somehow “beating” them, they proposed the whole process as a social experiment to find the best transportation results for everyone, progress grew pretty continuous. From small groups advocating bikes in cities, and larger groups using them but not fighting for their spread, more and more people got involved. And once the bikers took on auto companies, popular support overcame fears of losing old options.

Sometimes a contest is zero sum. One side wins and the other side loses. In the contest between those who don’t own productive property and those who do, getting rid of ownership means one side wins and the other side loses. Someone who loses ownership of a company may benefit in other respects, but he or she is not going to by some other means gain back more power or more wealth than the property conveyed.

But a great many other oppositions are not or do not have to be zero sum, even though, at first, everyone may think they are. For bikes versus cars if a really well conceived bike and mass transit inner city transportation pattern replaces a car centered pattern, everyone gains. The car folks don’t lose due to greater costs, or due to pollution, or even due to slower or less convenient transport. And this is why the approach the bikers finally settled on made sense. Make changes, carefully, with respect, to explore implications.

Didn’t some on the car side retain their hostility and opposition, even as the evidence of benefits mounted?

Yes, certainly. But even a cursory questioning revealed that it wasn’t because of anything about cars and bikes. Rather, those who remained car advocates, and who became militant about it, were really fighting not the transport project itself, but the project’s potential larger implications. They opposed a slippery slope to systemic social change. They opposed RPS.

This dynamic recurred over and over. It was the twofold task of the projects and movements seeking innovations to get the involved populations to assess them on their actual merits rather than to reject them because so many of their supporters favored separate, though related, overall systemic change. It was the task of those trying to ward off broader social change, and to ward off RPS, to fight each and every battle on grounds that to give in would be a slippery slope toward altering society’s overall character and that those changes would be a disaster.

Once movements for change understood this, they realized their ability to effectively advocate and justify RPS program writ large, and especially to dissipate fear of it, was critical to their winning separate components of it. The great bike crusades were a part of that. And the opponents were in one respect correct. When cities allowed only bikes and mass transit in downtown areas, and bikes appeared in huge numbers, the number of those bikers festooned with RPS slogans was undeniable.

Early Economic Campaigns

Anton Rocker, you were a student of linguistics and cognitive science and a prolific writer. You focussed politically on workplace attitudes and roles and played an important role in shaping the emergence of RPS workplace program and activism. You became Secretary of Labor for the RPS shadow government. It is hard to see how studying linguistics would have led to your workplace focus and revolutionary career. Do you remember what happened?

Sure. As you perhaps know, linguistic theory was and still remains very much beholden to Noam Chomsky’s work. Well, the guy had two lives. In one, he was this world class scientist in linguistics and cognitive science. You read his linguistics contributions and there was no pretense, no obscurantist verbiage. He offered clear logic and lots of evidence and always focussed on fundamental matters.

So one evening over a beer I was chatting with a friend on a date, and she asked about my studies and said she had read a lot of Chomsky, too, but she was referring to his other incarnation wherein he was a prolific, provocative, and unrelentingly radical historian of contemporary relations.

Not long thereafter I got sick and went online looking for something to read while I was bedridden and decided I’d try one of Chomsky’s political books. And the truth is, that was it. I read it. I was not just impressed, but opened up so fully that in the following months my way of viewing the world and even myself transformed. By way of Chomsky I also came across other radicals writing about economic and social life and experiences. Before long I had revolutionary beliefs.

I have also been asking folks to briefly recount some event or campaign in the period of RPS emerging that was particularly moving and inspiring for them.

I guess more or less like most who have been in RPS all along, I was moved greatly by the first convention, and the second one too. The campaign to balance jobs was very important for me and later working in the Shadow Government, of course. But there was one unusual and purely personal experience. It was not too long before the first convention, at the time of the major Wall Street March.

I took a cab to get to the march venue from the airport and got in a discussion with my driver. We talked about politics and the Trump fiasco and he was no supporter, but rather very angry with Trump. I asked him, after a bit, if he thought we would ever have a President who sincerely served the interests of working people, rather than one who merely made believe he would do so to capture votes.

The guy said no, not really. We might have a president, maybe even not far off, who was sincere rather than consciously lying, but it wouldn’t matter too much. Such a president, even if really nice and honest, would still be from the world of education and polish and would not understand the actual real plight of working people so that even if he tried, he would fall short of representing workers.

So I asked what about if we had an actual worker win as President, someone without all that polish, but not a rich bully like Trump. Rather, a real working class person with working class values and agendas. He said it just wouldn’t happen. No one like that could rise into media visibility, and, in any case, such a person wouldn’t win. Why, I wondered? Because workers, he said, would never vote for another worker as President in the U.S. They, and he included himself, would assume a worker just wouldn’t be able to do the job.

I was seriously shook by this. It was so depressing and so wrong about the potentials of a working person, but so right, sadly, about the history we had long endured. I knew then that for RPS to attain its full goals we had to overcome this self deprecation in people’s minds and hearts, or we would lose over and over. So it molded my priorities for ever after.

There wasn’t too much workplace activism afoot after the initial convention. What were the early involvements of RPS folks on that front?

The first large thrust was about minimum wage. It had come out of a range of dissent that had been called Occupy Wall Street but which also addressed many other financial centers around the world. The main post convention economic focus had started years earlier with low income service workers in the fast food industry who had fought with considerable success. Next came more general campaigns for an increased minimum wage for public service workers, and then for all workers. During the Sanders/Clinton campaign for the Democratic 2016 nomination, minimum wage efforts got national prominence. Trump’s victory was a major setback, shifting focus to blocking his insane policies, but by the time of the RPS first convention, the fight for a higher minimum wage and wages more generally, not least by strike waves including particularly by the UAW, was entrenched and it was obvious RPS would support it. The only issue was could RPS bring anything new to these campaigns, or would we just throw in our energies too.

The second economic impetus rising into some prominence during the first convention, and then morphing into program and finally actual practical struggle, was about the duration of work. In the half century from 1955 to 2005, productivity per worker had soared. That meant output per capita was way up too. Indeed, by 2005 it was almost precisely double what it had been in 1955. Yet, work duration had also gone up dramatically. After fifty years, people had less vacation time, longer work weeks, and many more people had to hold two jobs while others suffered from having no job at all.

With the product of all that productivity going overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 20% and even to the top 1% and even 0.1%, inequality horribly enlarged. Likewise, leisure—or time off work—was harshly reduced rather than enlarged, which in turn reduced quality of life and quality of relationships and families.

So, we wondered, what might RPS do? The thinking at the convention and after went like this.

To the effort to reduce inequality by raising minimum wages, RPS could add not only our support, but also a new dimension—well, not entirely new, of  course, but reinvigorated.

Why should there be a higher minimum wage? One reply, then dominant, was we must accept that earning income due to owning property, or due to having greater bargaining power, or due to working with more productive tools, or due to having more productive attributes, is inevitable. The share of social product we each get will inevitably vary with property, power, and output. However, the dynamic had gotten exaggerated and at the lowest end wages need to be raised to get us back into an acceptable pattern.

A second reply was that the social product we each receive should depend only on how long we work, how hard we work, and how onerous our work is. Because those now getting the least pay also have least power, have no property, and work very long and often longest under very onerous and often the most onerous conditions, for them to earn a higher minimum wage would move us in the right direction, though it would be only a first modest step.

This change in mindset moved the fight for a higher minimum wage from being a reformist battle to win a modest readjustment after which the issue would be closed, to being a fight for a somewhat better position now in an ongoing battle over the entire logic of remuneration. Thus, the battle became a non reformist struggle. We would fight for a higher minimum wage not to win and go home, satisfied that our victory was all that could be had, but to win and then fight on, clear about just how much more we desired and should have.

I remember a fight at the University of Chicago for a higher wage for groundskeepers and custodians. It adopted the RPS approach so the activists there didn’t argue the correct, ethical, economically sound income was some modestly increased amount. No, they asked why are we who work longer hours, in worse conditions, and with more intensity, earning vastly less than faculty, and stupendously less than the President of the University? They fought for immediate gain, of course, but then fought on for more. They worked to raise basic issues and to develop lasting consciousness gains at every stage of their efforts. Their organizing emphasized the potentials of the low paid, not their deprivations. It emphasized the unjust incomes of the most highly paid, not some mystical worthiness.

You said there were two RPS early priorities?

Yes, the second RPS focus was the emerging battle over duration of work that I think Bernie Sanders had earlier introduced onto the national stage, but the RPS form had a few additional aspects.

First, it was about reducing the duration of work by winning more vacation time, shorter workdays, and shorter work weeks. Our main demand was to cut back to 30 hours of work per week though we quickly realized that this alone wasn’t enough to ensure good results. If we cut 10 hours off all jobs, incomes pegged to hours worked that were already too low for 80% of the workforce would become 25% lower per month. Those workers would then have to work second jobs so that when the dust cleared, they would be back where they started, or even worse off.

The more we thought about that, the more we understood that income distribution in present arrangements was about bargaining power not about rates of pay per se, or even about hours per se. If you won a change in pay rates or in duration of work, but you didn’t change the balance of power, then once the situation settled, those with power would impose some new change to gain back whatever they would otherwise have lost. It might be prices going up so that that real income didn’t change though nominal wages per hour did. Or it might be to impose multiple jobs per person if people were to survive, or to impose greatly escalated overtime so overall hours didn’t change.

So we demanded 30 hours work for 40 hours pay but also triple a worker’s new hourly rate for overtime. But then we realized that that would give a better pay rate per 30 hours, not only to those who had low incomes, but also to those who had really high incomes. So we modified the demand further to be 30 hours work for 40 hours pay (and thus a higher hourly rate) for those who were earning less than $100,000 per year but for those earning above that, they would get 30 hours at their old pay rate.

There was yet another dimension which became central to arguments about this program. If everyone who was working before would now work 25% less each week, could society get by with 25% less product, or, if not, where would additional product come from? The first part of making up for the lost product was to seek full employment which would add labor hours back into the economy and increase worker security and bargaining power as well. The second part of answering this concern was to note that some reduction of output would be ecologically good, and the reduction, as with efforts spurred by more directly ecological concerns, could be in redundant or harmful output like military production, non durable production, excessive private goods reduced and public goods increased, and so on. Reducing output could be not at all socially painful if we eliminated only relatively or even absolutely useless and damaging output rather than what was most needed and desired. Reduction wouldn’t occur, for example, in legitimate medical care, or in teaching, or in necessary goods, and so on. Cuts would center on military production, on redundancy, on waste, and on outrageous luxuries. But in that case, there would need to be major upgrades in on the job and pre job training for people who would change to more useful jobs which was another benefit, of course. This whole discussion kept enlarging in implications, in this case moving from focusing income to also address the ecological concerns of the then burgeoning degrowth approach.

The point is we kept tweaking our ideas to arrive at a campaign that would win important and lasting gains that could not be whittled away, and that would also create conditions that would propel battles for still more gains, for example, people have more time to give to community involvement. A very similar story held for virtually the entirety of the RPS agenda. For example, RPS was centrally concerned with ecological issues per se, but as we fought to reduce and eliminate fossil fuel use, we linked those demands to demands to take appropriate care of workers whose jobs would disappear. And it wasn’t even just to provide training and new comparable work. Why should someone at 50 or 60 years of age have to start all over? They shouldn’t and for those who didn’t want to we demanded an option to retire early at full salary for the years until natural retirement where the income to finance the approach would come from increased taxes on corporate profits, massive inheritances, and so on. 

RPS wanted not only macro economic program, like a higher minimum wage and a shorter work week, but also gains in specific industries and workplaces that would be won by workers located there. What were the obstacles RPS had to overcome in trying to organize workers around their own workplace conditions and their own lack of local power?

The basic answer is well known. Owners try to maintain their high profits and to that end owners interfere with organizing efforts every way they can. They were hell bent on their profits and power, and so also on forcing us to abide the straightjacket of their laws, their dogma, their brute force. That much we expected. What surprised us was initially encountering considerable worker resistance to RPS agendas.

This took a few forms. Fighting for higher wages or for some specific rule change that workers wanted was one thing. Workers might doubt it could succeed, or might fear retaliation from owners, but that, again, was an expected obstacle. Trying to organize workers to take initiative for decisions and to form their own councils to try to control work relations, was a very different matter.

For a battle over wages or conditions, the task of organizing was familiar. You had to hear the desires of people and propose demands that could be won to meet those desires. Then you had to find ways to communicate with fellow workers to overcome their perfectly reasonable fears of being fired or otherwise penalized for seeking to win change.

For the latter type of battle about decision making, however, the situation was more complex. Many workers did not trust organizers who argued for greater power for workers. They thought it was a trick by owners to elicit more work per hour. Another very different sort of problem was that many workers self deprecatingly worried they wouldn’t make good decisions. They had imbibed the propaganda that they weren’t smart enough or didn’t and couldn’t know enough. Or sometimes worker’s felt, why should I make decisions about how to maximize profits for the owners? In fact, why should I take any initiative? Doing so will just add more hassle to my life, and I won’t get anything for it. Or some workers felt that making decisions would be a grave burden rather than a gain.

The first step to make progress was to admit that based on past experiences workers had good reason for their many doubts. The second step was to reveal the kinds of decisions they might take and the impact it could have. The third step was deeper. We had to discuss the structure of work and why workers didn’t have much knowledge or confidence at work, and what ought to be done about that.

This last part of that agenda was the core point of the initial battles over creating worker assemblies and starting to use them. Having assemblies seek worker’s self management challenged the “nothing more is possible” propaganda and the “you are too dumb to manage” propaganda the workers had to some degree accepted, and it opened up discussions of what new relations a revamped workplace would need to have if it was to be really worthy and liberating. To a considerable degree it was about dignity and respect. It took time, but we made steady headway less because we were right, which was true enough, but more because we became good at hearing worker’s fears, respecting them, and carefully showing how workers might avoid the feared outcomes.

How was a connection made among all the efforts and what became most successful in terms of generating not only change, but support?

I think the key step was the early national campaign for a shorter work week we already talked about. For decades the duration of work by Americans had climbed. Two and three job families had declining family incomes. Workers with unpaid or even paid overtime had declining real incomes. Home work entailed lost benefits and longer hours. Yet productivity per hour rose tremendously. Where did the enlarged product go? It went to the rich. IT went to war. And it went to waste. Did people want to work their lives away to produce ever more opulence for the already opulent, plus murder machines, plus garbage?

RPS began a campaign for a thirty hour work week. Firms could arrange their thirty hours however they chose, but the thirty hours was an upper limit. Firms could have someone work overtime, but for triple their usual hourly pay rate. You want more work from an individual, you pay for it. You want more work total, you hire more workers.

But when RPS folks started to discuss this as a demand, as I already mentioned, we quickly realized there was a non income aspect. Cutting hours worked to produce waste, or killing machines, or opulence for the opulent, by 25% or even more, would be good even if no one was hired from the previously unemployed to jack back up lost output. But what about reducing the outlay of work 25% for all managers, lawyers, doctors and the whole coordinator class?

So the demand was further refined by discussions among advocates for a considerable time before it fully emerged. As I said before, it was thirty hours work for forty hours of their prior hourly rate for those who earned, before the change, less than $100,000 a year. But thirty hours work for thirty hours of their prior hourly rate, for people who earned, before the change over $100,000. But then we added having public subsidies for on the job training to replace highly skilled work, with the realignment including job sharing that moved toward balanced job complexes.

Of course it didn’t start with all the caveats and various other conditions that I am not even listing, but it got there, and it is easy to see just how redistributive and radical it became.

It is a bit off topic, but I have heard you are vegan and wondered if it has had any bearing on your RPS involvement?

Yes, I am. For me, it is partly a matter of health and also cost. A vegan diet is healthier and nowadays also less expensive and far less ecologically damaging than a meat heavy diet. But my reasons are also ethical. I can’t handle eating animals. I would abstain even if it hurt my own health some, or if it cost me more per meal.

Some people with this stance believe it is valid, unimpeachable, unchallengeable, and see people eating meat as immoral. Some even see eating meat as abetting murder. Some say that a restaurant serving hamburgers is like a Nazi gas chamber and that the owners are like proprietors of fascist ovens while the patrons take what they consider benefits from the animal holocaust.

I don’t subscribe to any of that. I also have never met anyone who I felt really believed that kind of thing, even if they loudly claimed they did. I mean, imagine for a moment, that you lived in a country that had what you considered ovens for murder comparable to the Nazi gas chambers on nearly every city block. In New York there are about 25,000 eating establishments. Would someone who really thinks there are 25,000 nazi-like killing establishments right on the street, merely complain loudly?

On the other hand, I do think a meat-free and even a vegan diet is health superior for the individual and certainly for the planet. And I think it is ethically better, as well. So I do think this stance is pragmatically and morally worth exploring, advocating, and seeking reforms to approach. I also think our numbers are growing and I would not be surprised if a future society that is fully transformed in RPS ways and has been operating for some time will leave behind eating animals. I guess we will find out. But I do not think it has been a core part of RPS program and I am okay with that.

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