In which Lydia Luxemburg and Bert Dellinger discuss ideas, values, self management, diversity, flexibility, and institutional vision.

[Author’s Note: This is the seventh excerpt from a work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This excerpt will also provide the substance for a forthcoming  RevolutionZ episode titled. 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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RPS Ideas

Lydia Luxemburg, you became political in the great upheavals of the 1960s. You have held many jobs over the years but in just a few minutes of our time together my impression is that only some were permanent and basic to your motivations and perceptions, that of life-long feminist, activist, organization builder, media worker, revolutionary. You are therefore one of the best RPS participants for addressing its past and future contours, including having been its first shadow government President. I hope you won’t take it as ageist or otherwise offensive, but you have been a personal inspiration for me for a long time, not least due to the longevity of your focus and effectivity.

You are very kind. Thank you. I appreciate it. And hopefully I can hang around a bit longer.

I have been asking all my interviewees how they first became radicalized, so I should ask you too, though of course there are various biographies telling your story in full.

I was in college in the 1960s and, like many others, I got caught up in the culture of the times and also the politics. I became anti war and then anti imperialist due to the butchery my country imposed on Indochina. I became feminist in considerable part, perhaps even mainly, due to the sexism within the left itself, the assumption that women were ornaments to be paraded and servants to do tasks that men wished to avoid. I became revolutionary when my mind and heart linked in a commitment to win better.

But you were in position by your birth ties to be a beneficiary of wealth and power, not a victim. Why didn’t you grab what you could?

I am not the best self-analyst but I would say it was partly moral outrage and partly a sense of solidarity with others. I felt more kinship with the Vietnamese and with Mississippi Blacks than with the New York jet set I was born to join. The sixties birthed a set of communal rather than loner attitudes and desires. The wealth and power we were supposed to sell out for began to repulse me and activism began to attract me. Imagine a vegetarian is offered a year’s supply of steak to ignore the hunger others were suffering. The bribe would be no bribe at all. The truth is, I did grab what I wanted. I wanted change.

You were very militant, according to what I have read, angry and out front. Is that right? Do you remember your feelings from those days?

I wrote a long poem, I suppose you might call it, as the dedication for a book I published in the early seventies. I still remember reading it aloud for some friends to test it before I decided to include it in the book. I think it well represented my feelings and the feelings of many others as well, at that time… And I can remember it, if you want.

Yes, please, go ahead.

For workers on the line, bored, tired, and robbed of their creative days

For women raped, pinched, door-opened, de-cultured, feminized, beaten, maimed, married, asylum-ed

For Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, nameless, robbed of dignity, lynched, harassed, low-paid, running, jailed

For the drunks and addicts, the worn out and the never lively, for the old and ill who should be long lived and wise

For the young, schooled and unschooled, end-running boredom, doing drugs, stealing sex and losing love, trying to escape out or trying to find a way in

For those on welfare or off, looking in or looking out, employed or unemployed, alone or in pairs, hiding their sex or flaunting it, angry, sad, mad

For those who feel less than they could feel, for those who are less than they could be, exploited, starved, cheated, tortured, ambushed, kidnapped, death squadded

For all the world’s citizens suffering brutality and indignity, electric shocks and murdered relatives, starvation and working for pennies, the military boot and the cultural stamp

For the empire’s citizens and the empire’s enemies…

Sounds a little like Dylan…

Young Dylan. I hope it does, yes. But it isn’t done.

For the strikers, saboteurs, feminists, anarchists, and nationalists, occupiers and death defiers

For the New Leftists, Panthers, Women’s Liberationists, Farm Workers, Puerto Rican Nationalists, for those of AIM and their relatives who resisted and died in the past and who nonetheless live on

For the ones who dodged the draft, for those who went and disrupted, and for those who went and died, or lived

For the French in the streets in May and the Italians in Autumn, for the Mexicans in Summer and the Czechs and Chinese

For everyone who has fought, fights, or will fight for a better world than they were, are, or are going to be bequeathed…

What about enemies?

And against doctors who deal in dollars not dignity, against owners, administrators, bosses, rapists, dealers of bad hands, intellectuals who keep knowledge as if it were their private property, who enshrine their own ignorance under false halos, who can justify barbarism or technically dissect it as their interests require, but who never shed a tear…

And there was more, I think. And I think that indicates what I and so many others were feeling back in the sixties and through the seventies. Looking back, I think you can see how it was in some ways RPS sentiments taking shape. But then in the eighties and nineties, and twenty plus years into this century, too, few people understood such feelings, so I buried the anger, and militancy. For me the birth of RPS ended a long emotional coma. I became myself again. Do you remember when the Swedish ecological activist, the then 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told off the U.S. Congress. I think in some ways that spurred lots of emotional awakening in me and many others. Get up grandma, get back in the fight.

I have also been asking folks to recount a personally moving or inspiring event or campaign from the past twenty years. Would you do that for us too, please?

At Trump’s inauguration the huge outpouring of women and men, not just in Washington, which was enormous, but all around the U.S., and, understandably, given the international role of the U.S., all around the world, was, for me, an incredibly timely boost for what had been my then somewhat precarious personal morale. From then on, it was one inspiring campaign after another, though of course there were plenty of setbacks too, and also less exemplary moments.

One particularly moving experience was that during the community control of police campaigns I was able to spend some time talking with what had begun to be called exonerees. These were people who had been jailed for crimes they did not commit, and who were later exonerated and released. To hear their stories, particularly people who had been imprisoned for years, and even for decades, and to hear of the incredible travail that awaited them even upon their being exonerated due to people they knew earlier being long dead, and their having no home, and to see their cheer and positivity despite all that, and despite all the pain in their past and that was still to come, that was for me an incredible testimony to human potential even as it also evidenced—as if I needed to hear it anew—just how insanely cruel our society was.

Considering all the people incarcerated by plea bargain deals who in order to avoid worse injustice accepted lesser injustice, and all the people in jail for victimless crimes who were in turn made deadly by the deadliness of it all, well, I saw the underside of the underside of current relations, and like the upper side of current relations, it needed nothing so much as total renovation.

But I also had a very different kind of experience, far more personal yet, I thought, also political, that greatly affected me. I had decided to try to write a novel to get across the kinds of ideas and commitments I was always advocating but in a different and hopefully more effective way. So I wrote a draft of the novel, and while I had written plenty and often before, a novel was a first for me and I was quite unclear on whether it had any merit and quite sure I needed reactions to guide making it better, supposing that trying to do that even made sense.

So I sent a draft to a whole bunch of people who I had worked with, or was friends with, and also to many family members. I knew it was a lot to ask people to take a look at a whole book, but I asked anyhow, making clear that I needed and was hoping for any reactions people might have—questions, suggestions, or criticisms—as a way to try to make the book better. And then came a surprise. I think five out of about twenty five people I sent the draft to even bothered to acknowledge receiving it. Those five said they would get to it soon, but none did. The other twenty also didn’t read it or provide comment, or even acknowledge the request having occurred. Not one out of the twenty five asked a single question. Not one even asked what it was like to try to write a novel, much less did anyone ask anything about its contents.

This wasn’t a technical work. It was a story about matters of society and people’s reactions and experiences to circumstances that were key to all our lives. Yet there was no curiosity much less inclination to try to help. Yet each person I sent the draft to was, as a potential reader, on as firm grounds as I to evaluate the draft, and to make suggestions about it.

And I thought about this and at first, honestly, I was just hurt. It wasn’t disturbing that any one person didn’t reply since there could be various reasons in any individual case. What hurt was the universality of it. I was sure that had any one of these people sent me something comparable, and asked my reaction in hopes I might provide help to guide improvements, I would acknowledge receiving the draft, have questions about it, and then at least try to provide help, or I would have reported my incapacity to do so if I tried but failed.

And when I thought about that, my sadness only grew, but it also changed a bit. It seemed to me this kind of silence was emblematic of contemporary life in the U.S. Everyone at that time thought it showed a degree of human solidarity, civility, and sympathy to say, “have a nice day” and to otherwise appear civil and concerned. It didn’t matter if you meant it or not. It was quick, it was easy, it was good optics, as we used to say,  and you got points for it. More, if you didn’t do it, you were a self-centered bore. But to sincerely regard one another with interest about something substantive, or to say original caring things and actually mean them, well, that might be taken wrong. It might elicit criticism, and it wasn’t easy since it took time. You might even get negative points for your effort. And so people didn’t bother and in time not bothering became acceptable and even in a weird way, mandatory. It was normalized. This eventually became “ghosting,” where you ignored and even entirely cut off communications without a word. This was a seriously anti-social time.

Surface cordiality plus below the surface aloofness became the U.S. cultural order. Superficial civility was familiar, understood, and accepted. Serious intent and effort to be helpful, to care, was unfamiliar, and often misunderstood and even rejected. To avoid the former as paternalistic was considered uncivil. To seek the later as solidaritous was considered intrusive or even selfish. Social atoms, bouncing around, saying “hi, have a nice day,” and moving on, was what people expected and welcomed. More substantial interest struck people as strange and intrusive.

We had as a people, in my view of it, become so insular, so focused on popular culture, the weather, or consumer news as a safe way to engage, and so removed from our abilities to evaluate and think about anything social and from our abilities to actually apply ourselves beyond reflex reactions that we would see an act like sending around a book draft seeking advice rather like we might see a stranger asking us to help them with something totally foreign, totally beyond us, totally lacking interest for us.

Ask about a ballgame, a TV show, or a dinner out, and people often eagerly converse. No risk. Auto pilot. Ask about some horrible event or events, some political enemy, or whatever else of that sort, where there is universal instant agreement, and again, people are at least reasonably quick to have spontaneous opinions, which, however, in the circles where they are offered are commonplace and accepted even before being uttered. Auto pilot. But to try to dig in and think through the cause and effect of spontaneous opinions much less unexpected original opinions, that went too far.

In that context, if you ask about a new socially aimed novel or about anything else that would require reacting in ways that required thought beyond what was common and safe, and where a comment might even be thought less than ideal, and the energy for engagement dissipated. You couldn’t tweet a reaction to a draft of a book, so the reaction was never produced, nor was even a simple acknowledgement. At any rate, this experience had a broad and amorphous affect on me, impacting how I related to RPS as it was emerging and affecting what acts I thought could and could not reach people, which is why it came to mind, I guess, in reply to your question.

When RPS was first emerging, I guess you were already around seventy and had had a lifetime’s worth of activism as your history. Did it take you by surprise? Did you feel vindicated?

Honestly, I think I felt more like, what took so damn long? I mean I knew why so many efforts had lost, lost, lost when measured against the norm of establishing an organization that could last right through winning a new society, but still, I felt like—jeez, some of us knew at least broadly what was needed aeons ago. Why couldn’t we do a better job of bringing it into being?  When the Black Lives Matter activism and MeToo exploded it was incredible. And when RPS started to jell, even more so. So RPS happening didn’t surprise me but I certainly didn’t feel vindicated. I was ecstatic it was happening, but I was also tormented by how many lives had been lost or made less than they could have been by the fact that my generation hadn’t done better when we were young.

You really felt responsible?

Yes, because, with others, I was responsible. We knew much that if we had conveyed it better, if we had done better, could have brought on the birth of something like RPS much sooner. To my mind, that was obvious.

Even before the first convention, what ideas did you think distinguished RPS from many predecessor projects that hadn’t taken off? What ideas attracted you back at the beginning, and what do you think served as a foundation for what has emerged since?

Remembering back, I would say the thing that first got me intellectually engaged was the way RPS overcame some problems with my prior ways of thinking about society and history.

Before I was attracted to RPS I was a very militant feminist. Of course I remained that, but before RPS I saw the world refracted through a lens that highlighted gender relations so heavily that much else went largely or even completely unnoticed. It wasn’t that I explicitly thought everything else was unimportant, it was that my totally warranted attention to gender monopolized my perceptions and thoughts to the exclusion of seeing much else.

I would go into a workplace and see the relative situation of men and women, how they related, what people were doing and why, and what they got for it—but all as men and women. Same for how I saw church, education, and families. I saw how men and women had different circumstances and rewards and costs. I saw their connections and disconnections. To a considerable degree I saw variants on the nuclear family, ported to other realms than households, with women typically filling roles that included mother-like and housewife-like attributes and men filling roles that included father-like and husband-like attributes. And seeing all that was valid, real. But I tended to miss or at least not dwell on and realize the importance of other aspects.

It is odd, because I had been closer to the RPS view earlier, back in the late sixties and early seventies, but then for a time I lost my multi focus balance. My approach prior to RPS—but post my Sixties New Left involvements—was a bit like looking at the world through a filter that makes certain colors or shapes very intense while causing other colors or shapes to fade in comparison. I saw male and female in high definition. The rest was less sharp and even blurry.

Add to that my personal intensity and first hand knowledge as a woman about the situation of women, and I was highly attuned to gender and sexuality, which was good, but barely attuned to class, race, and other dynamics, which was not good. I was particularly blind to interrelations among all these facets of society, and especially to what pushed on kinship so much as to alter it—as compared to how kinship pushed on other facets of society sufficiently to alter them, which I was attuned to. I saw, to go back to that workplace church, or household, how sexist relations permeated each and affected their definition, but I did not see nearly so clearly how relations coming from outside permeated and affected family relations.

So I was initially standoffish about how intent RPS was on adopting a holistic approach. Honestly, at first it felt like some kind of purist badgering, bugging me, even though I knew that when I was in my early 20s I had had a very similar inclination. However, for whatever reasons, in time RPS elevation of all central sides of social life to parallel importance began to convince me, or perhaps I should say began to re-convince me that we should not assume any hierarchy of importance among the different defining parts of life and society.

But why were you initially standoffish? Why didn’t the insight simply grab you, right off, without resistance on your part?

At first, I remember that I worried that to promote the parallel importance of non gender dynamics would lead me to discount and finally relegate kinship and gender to lower priority and attention than I was sure they deserved. I worried that if I and others stopped elevating kinship above everything else, various men with various other agendas would manage to peripheralize gender. Indeed, I so feared that prospect that it took some time for me to even hear the RPS message much less grapple with it, and finally agree with it.

Another aspect of this was how I pursued feminism, or, for that matter, how other people pursued their anti racism, or their anti capitalism. Often it was a matter of us protecting against ills but not pursuing virtues. And there is a difference.

The defensive mindset could yield a fortress mentality. It prioritized constantly calling out and punishing whatever one sought to ward off, in my case, sexism, in someone else’s case, perhaps racism or classism. Our priority was to see certain ills in high definition, and then to avoid them, to beat them back. We didn’t conceive and advocate new positive outcomes regarding other ills. With the defensive mindset we saw mainly how choices could yield, in my case, men dominating and women yielding. We were then reflexively negative about attending to other ills. We might poo pooh union strikes. Or the person keyed to class might poo pooh concern with abortion or violence against women.

But I did finally hear and I did finally realize, wait a minute, my fear that kinship will be minimized if I don’t maximize it is exactly what maximizing kinship does to other parts of social life, it minimizes them. There has to be a better way than to pick a focus, whether kinship or anything else, and defend it to the exclusion of properly attending to other equally critical focuses. I realized RPS was adding other critical focuses, not subtracting my also critical focus.

Once that insight penetrated my defenses, I didn’t have to agree that something else trumped my feminism to adopt the RPS approach. I just had to see that the economy, polity, and race also played pivotal roles. I had to see that just as pressures from gender could mold other parts of society until those other parts did not violate or would even buttress central kinship characteristics—so too could pressures arising from economy, polity, or culture mold gender-related roles to not violate or even to buttress central economic, political, or cultural characteristics.

What was remarkable about all this was as soon as I was open to seeing such mutual relations, I saw them all over. They became high def too. RPS revealed how dynamics in one part of life could alter the defining logic and relations of other parts. It revealed how fixating on one part could interfere with seeing interrelations. It saw class in families and schools, gender in workplaces and churches, race in government and health, and on and on. It showed how economics affected politics, how race and nationality affected economics, and how gender and kinship affected culture and economy and politics but was also affected by them. It provided a basis for a project that could unify key constituencies without submerging the concerns of any of them.

It made me see that we should use concepts able to overcome all our biases and reject concepts that narrowed us to pursue only our most personal inclinations. This was the tight connection between thought and action that RPS propelled, and I liked it.

Can you give me an example or two of this insight advancing your understanding compared to what it had been earlier? Did it change how you understood winning change?

The RPS view got me to understand that you couldn’t change gender relations by only focussing on the home and upbringing. It was in the home that the basic structures which defined sexism were rooted. But it was not alone there.

The RPS idea was that the pressures of sexist kinship roles have requirements for men and women. These requirements imprinted people with beliefs, values, and habits producing men and women with gender-specific expectations and inclinations. These attributes didn’t magically disappear if a man or woman exited a living unit and entered a workplace, ballpark, church, school, or mall. Other institutions then abided or violated the family-based expectations and inclinations. If they violated, there would be contradiction and need for resolution. If they abided, there would be mutual enforcement and stability. And this interaction could be even more profound. Other institutions could begin to incorporate the same sexist logic as households such that they became not just compatible with persistent sexism, but sources of its reproduction. Then, a movement might win important changes in households, but if that movement ignored the sexism that had become entrenched elsewhere, emanations from those other places could push back on the changed households, causing them to revert.

And this same pattern holds for class and race too. We can see that class and race permeate society. They are not just active in economy and culture, respectively. There are sources of class and race hierarchy present in laws and families, and not just in workplaces and cultural venues.

The upshot of all this was that to change society it would be a major error to think one should identify some single social focus because winning in that focussed realm would change everything. The incredible truth was, with a single focus approach, seemingly winning for that focus wouldn’t even win just for it, because the win could be temporary and in time wiped out by unaltered relations in other parts of society.

Once one had that perspective, it was easy to see the need for broader movement connections. Before having that perspective, it was not so easy.

Can you give a less abstract example, perhaps one from back near the start of RPS, that caused a different view than had been prevalent, including different actions?

The Sanders campaign, and then the rise of Donald Trump. You may remember from the histories of that time, that those campaigns had a profound effect in diverse ways. But there was also great controversy about the meaning of some aspects of what occurred. Many white men supported Trump, but why? Trump was rich, violent, egomaniacal, racist, sexist, steadily ever more fascist, really an abomination. Still, he undeniably had a whole lot of support and it was often support that should have gone to Sanders and that would need be needed to win any successful project for a truly new society.

Okay, there were many variables of course, and I won’t rehearse everything, but here is a line of thinking which came from the kinds of insight I have been noting and that was earlier mostly absent, though later preponderant.

Women and Blacks were then and had for a long time been fighting hard for a better situation in society. They were doing so, very often, as women and as Blacks. Watching that, and hearing that, and sometimes encountering it, white men had to also assess their own situations, which were horribly deteriorating due to economic losses as well as by being marginalized by the political process, including and even especially by the Democratic Party.

Okay, so what is the white guy going to think? If society is mainly just a battle between genders and races, and that is what the white guy thinks he is hearing said—and if it is a personal fight at that, individual by individual—then white men’s worsening condition must have to do with, they might deduce, their losing that battle. And along comes a thug candidate to say that out loud, and to seemingly be ready to fight against it. Many identified with that feeling.

RPS later tried to identify their views but didn’t focus on blaming white men. Sure, there was racism, sexism, fear, and ignorance. But what were the roots of it? The RPS approach noticed but didn’t focus on the Democratic Party having moved toward ignoring people as workers in favor of attending to professionals and addressing people only as black, female, etc. That was true. That was important. But the RPS approach was mainly about finding what we ourselves can do to win change, not primarily about decrying what others were doing that we didn’t like.

Two things emerged as reasons for Trump’s support that had to do with our choices as people who understood and fought against social injustice. First, it began to seem to us like we were undeniably horrible at communicating about class to, ironically, the working class. If they didn’t see their worsening situation as a function of corporate policies and structures of which Trump was a prime emissary, where was the cause of that that we could address rather than just moan about?

Answer: it was in ourselves. We had to pay attention to why we weren’t being heard, why our words weren’t resonating with working people. The upshot was realizing that overall we didn’t respect, understand, relate to, hear, and learn sufficiently from working peoples’ concerns, which included our own concerns, and so working people didn’t see reason to listen to us. And, perhaps more than anything, we didn’t address the divide between workers and professionals or what RPS took to calling the coordinator class.

And the second awareness to emerge and later greatly impact RPS was about our approach to race and gender. To fight over improving the conditions of constituencies in ways that polarized others into becoming resistant to and even hostile to change beyond what their actual situations provoked was counter productive. We had to learn to fight racism, fight sexism, and fight homophobia and trans phobia, but simultaneously support working people, and yes white male working people, not as some throwaway line, but, because doing so was right as well as prerequisite to winning a new world.

And this was all hard for you to accept? I mean, now, just, what, I guess twenty five years later, it is all second nature. It is hard to see why it would have been so difficult.

When these notions surfaced and spread, or arguably re-surfaced and re-spread, we all had to overcome our long held narrow prioritizations. Some had prioritized economy and class. Some, like myself, had prioritized kinship, sexuality, and gender. Some had prioritized culture and race, or politics and power, or, for that matter, war and peace, or ecology and sustainability. At the extreme, people very self consciously prioritized one area above all others. Less drastically, and more often, people didn’t explicitly do that, but nonetheless, in difficult situations would fall back into that bias by way of the narrowing effect of the concepts they had forefront in mind. I was in that second camp.

To hear someone say that part of the fault for white men moving to the right with Trump was radicals doing a crappy job of communicating about class, and particularly about coordinator class / working class relations, and being clearly on the left side of that, felt like an assault on them to those who had been working so hard to confront capitalist owners. And to hear that part of the fault also rested with how blacks and women pursued their rightful anti racist and anti sexist agendas, felt to many, including me, like that assertion itself was racist and sexist. So it was very hard to navigate the tensions.

Still, the more I thought about all this, the more I saw, with many other people who became early adherents of RPS, that there were actually two problems with over-prioritizing one key focus as compared to others. Neither problem was that we might each personally focus our personal attention and activism more on one area than another. That is both inevitable and sensible. We can’t each do everything.

The first problem was that we would be active in ways diminishing our capacity for relating to phenomena beyond what we were focusing on or even diminishing our ability to best focus on the full complexity of what we were ourselves addressing. Elevating a particular side of life to conceptual priority above all else misled our efforts to understand society as a whole. Each effort to prioritize a particular area didn’t so much attribute too much importance to the preferred area as it attributed too little importance to other areas and, in so doing, missed much about critically important and mutually intersecting social relations and possibilities, sometimes not even noticing their presence. Approaches that elevated one priority (say, gender) above the rest (say economy, polity, and culture) tended to see the world through a single set of lenses (feminist) rather than utilizing a conceptual toolbox that had a number of sets of lenses.

But the second reason why prioritization was a serious problem was that it pitted constituencies that needed to work together against one another. Each narrowly-focused approach would declare or at least often act as if its own focus was paramount. Its adherents would often pursue their focus blind to the implications for other dynamics and relations. They wouldn’t say, we have to address race, class, gender—or whatever—but only in ways consistent with and even comparably addressing the other focuses.

It was like there was a slippery, heavy object we had to move. And there were various teams ready to work on doing so. Each team had a part of the whole that they knew best, a part that they most wanted to move, and a part that given their inclinations and dispositions they could grab and hold and tug better than they could grab, hold, and tug any other part. So each team grabbed their part, and then exerted courageously and unrelentingly, but also without noticing what the other teams were doing with their parts. So instead of all the teams moving all the parts in concert, so the whole object got where they intended, the teams were pulling and pushing their focussed parts in ways that at times conflicted with each other, so the whole object was just moving a bit here and a bit there, but never far in any direction. RPS said, hold on. Each part is critical, there is no denying that, but unless we address all of them in mutually enhancing ways, none of them are going to alter much. When adherents of different approaches are out of touch with each other, much less hostile to each other, it produces opposition and competition instead of mutual aid.

So even though I had found it hard to adopt the new view, what finally resonated most for me was RPS’s explicit recognition of multiple key sources of influence for how society works and for how we need to change it. It was not easy for me to express much less act on that encompassing view, and there were many ups and downs along the way, but these conceptual commitments were a big part of what attracted and held me. I realized these views traced back to the 1960s, at least, but for me, I really fully understood and was affected by the message by way of RPS. RPS found better ways and more lasting ways to convey the insights than those who had similar views decades before, including, ironically, myself.

Was this basically the debate between advocates of what were called identity politics and class politics?

Yes and no. That debate had raged for a long time and surfaced anew after Trump’s victory. The RPS approach was to think outside both boxes in ways that allowed each of the prior two poles of debate to participate positively and without any rancor toward the other.

It went like this. The class focus side had its roots in anti-capitalism which tended to cause adherents to think that class was so centrally important to social change that analyzing events, forming agendas, and having goals had to prioritize class and economy even at the expense of all else. The idea was that the tools for being attuned to class had to be constantly in hand and utilized, but the rest, not so much. The rest was even distraction. Of course there were all kinds of nuances. For example, the rest, yes, alright, that too, but always in service of class conceptions.

The identity politics side had its roots in feminist and anti racist organizing that in considerable part had reacted to the “mainly class” approach and its effects. It chose, at first, and for some adherents until long after, a new priority focus—either kinship or culture/race—and treated this alternative focus more or less as the class over everything folks had treated economy. But as the years passed and the debates bounced about, eventually the race, gender, and sexuality folks began to unite creating what some called identity politics. Identity, here, meant for those who highlighted class, everything other than class. The anger at identity politics was that it attended to more than issues of income, material relations, workplace power—when ironically that was actually a good inclination whose methods those elevating economy needed to incorporate even to get economy right. The anger in the other direction, toward class politics, was that it dismissed or at least seriously underplayed the extra economic interpersonal dimensions of race and gender.  

An additional dispute was that the class-first folks had always prioritized institutional dynamics. Their discussions of class and economy only rarely ventured into the day to day injuries of class at the personal level. For identity politics, attention instead went mainly to the attitudes, behavior patterns, and personalities of both advocates and opponents of the focused oppressions. In some ways the debate was like a flexible, complex tug of war. First it would shift a bit one way, then the other. Every so often each side would alter a bit, as well.

Each side had two lines of argument for its stance—one seen as objective, the other subjective or operational. So, the class side would argue in one form or another that economy is fundamental and class is paramount because economy is unavoidable and constrains and impacts all else. But the advocates of race, sex, or gender, or all of them together, made precisely the same case, with essentially the same logic, and equally valid, but in reverse. They each are unavoidable and constrain and impact all else. On this axis of argument, there really was no logical reason for the divide. You could hold both stances simultaneously, and there was no reason in the underlying logic to do otherwise. The same was true for paying priority attention to both institutions and mindsets/behaviors. You could elevate both, not one or the other.

In truth I don’t think the objective side of the debate had much to do with why people lined up as they did. But the operational side pushed the contending proponents into opposition. The class folks worried that giving comparable priority attention to race, gender, or sexuality as to class would diminish attention to class at great loss. The race, gender, and sexuality folks worried that giving priority attention to class would diminish attention to their areas at great loss. All that was required, as with the objective logical difference, was for both sides to see that both claims were correct. It was certainly possible—though not inevitable—that to give central attention to one focus would come at the expense of others. But, the only solution other than dropping attention to something that ought to be getting attention, was to give attention to all the focuses in ways that didn’t inhibit giving attention to the rest.

So RPS brought to all this a reiteration of views that had certainly existed a long time, and even been repeatedly but pretty unsuccessfully proposed earlier. RPS said, basically, the class folks are right about institutions being critical, and they are right that class is critical. The identity folks are right that the mindsets and behavior patterns of people are critical and that gender, race, and sexuality are critical. More, there is no contradiction between these many views as soon as each side acknowledges not only that its own views have merit, but so do the seemingly contrary but actually completely compatible views of the other side.

RPS said, simply, institutions and what is in people’s minds and habits are each important and mutually impact one another. Race, gender, sex, and class are each important and mutually impact one another. We should come at society giving forefront priority attention to institutions and to mentalities and behaviors and likewise to race, gender, class, and to sexuality, and we should not try to prioritize among these intersecting focuses. We should prioritize them all and how each contours and even reproduces the rest.

You said two RPS innovations played a major role in attracting you. What was the second?

It was something so simple that nowadays it may seem silly to even utter. Even at the time it was a very simple idea, one that had been long understood, and asserted, but that in actual daily situations didn’t seem to drive many people’s thinking, or mine, anyhow, until RPS came along.

This view refined one aspect from the class side of the debate that I just mentioned. It asserted that institutions affect outcomes overwhelmingly by the roles they make people fill if people are to gain the institution’s associated social benefits. It was a simple observation, almost self evident. If you want to be in the economy, you have to work someplace, consume via markets, and so on. To be in a religion you have to relate to its church or other structures. To be in a family, you have to be a mother, father, brother, or sister. If you want benefits from some institution, you have to comply with whatever roles you chose or were chosen to fill in that institution. Your roles in turn determined your range of acceptable actions.

If you are a nurse, congressperson, doctor, builder, driver, teacher, police officer, lawyer, judge, assembler, waiter, ballplayer, singer, actor, mother, father, child, parishioner, priest or whatever else, to gain benefits you have to behave consistent with your roles and with the other related roles in the institutions you navigate. There had long been a kind of vernacular slogan for it. You have to learn to “play the game,” to “fit in” meaning you have to learn to abide the accepted norms of your situation and adopt the behaviors required by your roles.

Once I became self consciously aware of this, I could feel it operating all over my life. I could see it in novels, movies, and even TV shows. We become what we do and we do what our situations require. This is true no less in a corporation, family, shopping center, or church than it is true in a prison, government, the military, or a criminal cartel and the observation has three major implications.

First, to evaluate a workplace, church, family, government or whatever—we have to reveal the roles people relate to in that institution to successfully engage with it. Having determined those roles, we have to reveal what the roles demand of people and thus who the roles cause people to become.

Second, to move from understanding an institution to changing it, we have to decide what mew roles could accomplish whatever social functions were needed from the institution more consistently with our preferences for social life. What is our goal for the institution in question? What roles block that goal? What new roles could accomplish that goal?

Third, given our circumstances and resources, we have to determine what we can fight for at any moment which will move us in the desired direction. What changes in our ways of organizing ourselves can move us nearer our goals and also prepare us to win further gains? Likewise, for that matter, what roles characterize our movements? We have to ensure they are consistent with our aims, rather than contrary to those aims.

For me, these aspects of RPS ideas were central attractions. They were simple but powerful. And they made RPS what it is.

Can you give an example of what kind of experience made you elevate the simple insight about roles and institutions to a centrally guiding norm of your thinking and doing?

Early in my time with RPS I was visiting an occupied workplace in the Midwest. I was talking with workers there about their situation and they were surprisingly despondent about their new circumstances deteriorating back toward what they had known before they took over. “All the old crap is coming back,” they reported, and they felt crushed by that fact because to them it said there was no alternative to the capitalist drudgery and poverty they thought they were escaping.

They had set up a workers’ assembly in order to have democratic decision making by everyone involved. They told me: “We took over and set up a workers’ council to have decision-making by everyone involved. We equalized wages. We practiced mutual support. It was exciting and felt wonderful. A year had passed and they reported that in recent weeks few have attended council meetings. Wage differences returned. Engaging work was reverting to being a debilitating, alienating chore.”

The workers got steadily more upset the more they described their deteriorating plight, and, most disturbingly, they attributed their worsening situation to their bosses and managers having been correct back when they had told the workers who first took over the plant, “you are naive. The inequalities and hierarchies you rebel against are part and parcel of being human. That is who we are. It is who you are. There is no alternative. Your joy at taking over this workplace will evaporate into failure.” Then the worker who was telling me this said, “Back then I laughed at him, but now, just a year later, I fear he was right.” The worker felt crushed that his prior boss’s depressing prediction was coming true. Another worker said, “All the old crap is coming back. It feels like there is no alternative to enduring the drudgery we thought we were escaping.”

I had become, not long before, an RPS organizer. And I knew that in taking over their workplace these workers had kept the old division of labor from the past. They had retained the same old jobs. In their new plant. Like previously, some people were doing overwhelmingly rote, repetitive, and otherwise disempowering work while other people were doing mainly empowering tasks.

I asked: “when you took over your workplace did you leave most people doing overwhelmingly rote, repetitive, and disempowering tasks while others took over mostly empowering tasks that managers and accountants and so on, had been doing before?” They said, “of course. We had to get production levels back up.”

The workers throughout this plant were from similar backgrounds. They had all been workers in the plant, earlier. They had also all grown up in working class homes and neighborhoods. They all had had little formal education. They were not elitist. They were leftist, especially at the moment of taking over. And at that moment they were mutually respectful, on a shared mission. But upon occupying their factory, most of them wound up with assembly work while about a fifth wound up with daily decision making and other empowering responsibilities.

They knew that was so, how could they not, but they didn’t register its importance. For them it was just how things are. It was how to get work done. I remember saying: “Human nature isn’t bringing back the old crap. An unchanged division of labor is the culprit. You all grew up in working class neighborhoods. You had little formal education. Upon occupying your factory, most of you wound up with assembly work while a few wound up with daily decision-making and other empowering tasks. Due to that arrangement, some of you became more confident and knowledgeable. You had access to decision making levers. And you had to act on all that to get jobs done. You became rulers while others remained ruled. Some newly became coordinator class while others remained working class. That result wasn’t written in your blood or brains. It flowed from retaining the old roles. As time passed, the folks who got empowering tasks saw themselves as more worthy. They started to feel they deserved more income and better conditions. They felt indispensable. Folks who instead got (or, actually, retained) disempowering tasks felt like cogs in a machine. They became resigned to less income and worse conditions. That’s the old crap coming back, isn’t it? But it wasn’t some inevitable rot coming back because it is built into being human. It was just the old division of labor, which was never replaced, reasserting its perverse logic.”

We talked more, but the point of the experience that bears on your question was that it was a very graphic instance of a very particular role definition overruling people’s good intentions by its implications for people’s daily options. The way the workers had divided up work into jobs had affected dynamics way beyond just getting the work done. It re-elevated old crap. This experience made clear to me that you have to take institutions and their roles very seriously. The analysis isn’t overly difficult or obscure. You didn’t need a big new vocabulary to talk about the situation. It is simple and ironically, for academics on the left, this simplicity meant it wasn’t any good..

They didn’t like that the analysis was simple? Can you explain that?

Such people liked to look smart by their long sentences and big words. That inclination or habit too was a product, but in that case of academic training and circumstances. If you spoke plainly and you advocated simple (but powerful) insights, you weren’t part of their community. They acted as if being clear and understandable revealed intellectual poverty and irrelevance. It may sound absurd, or perverse, but it makes sense if you realize this was just another part of the problem of coordinator habits and practices distorting left behavior.

For RPS members to speak plainly and advocate simple insights upset left academics who routinely worked hard to use long sentences and obscure words. Of course not all did that, and no one literally said it, well almost no one, and some hated it but played along to get along, and it may sound perverse, but after a time we realized that when your status, income, and power spring from having a monopoly on empowering circumstances, defending your status, income, and power depends on making sure your information and skills remain inaccessible to people beneath you. Your assets can’t appear pedestrian. They better appear, and indeed you need to make them appear highly complex. This held not only for lawyers and doctors, but for academics including, all too often, left academics.

What do you mean “almost no one”?

Well, I actually looked into it at one point. The modern attention to this class difference started with an essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. They called what I call the coordinator class the professional managerial class. A book was assembled and published of a bunch of folks responding to their piece. That was where the label coordinator class was first used, I think, in one of the responses, but to what you are asking, I was surprised to see that a frequent complaint of critics of the Ehrenreich’s was that seeing two classes of waged employees below owners was just American anti-intellectualism. I think their posing it that way was respected academics doing what I mentioned above, dismissing a critically important insight because it was simply put and even worse, it challenged academic obscurantist mythology and associated class interests.

But regardless of academics minimizing attention to coordinator class habits, back then and really right up to now, though no longer among activist academics, the new ideas were not only accessible, they were also intensely practical. If you don’t pay attention to choices about institutions and their roles, some seemingly innocuous choice, or a choice that seemed to you inevitable but was taken for granted, could subvert your best intentions. Retaining the old division of labor was an example. The experience of the workers taking over firms didn’t just show that institutions and their roles matter, it showed that they mattered so much that we had to focus on which features were okay, on which were not, and on what new ones would be better.

So academics didn’t like spreading skills? When was that?

The book was in the late 1970s, maybe 1978 I think. And the critics in the book didn’t like the Ehrenreich’s and some others criticizing the PMC for monopolizing empowering work which included not liking the verbal gibber jabber that justified their doing so. Nonetheless, the simple ideas were not only accessible, they were intensely practical. It was a long battle that had earlier origins way back with anarchists like Bakunin, but a simple lesson slowly gained ground. If you don’t pay close attention to choices about institutions and roles some seemingly inevitable choice that you take for granted can subvert your best intentions. Retaining the old division of labor was just such a choice. That lesson forever affected me. We had to understand not just bad outcomes, but the structures that produced the bad outcomes.

RPS Values

Bert Dellinger, you were politicized by no nukes and anti war activism. You became a key advocate of RPS from its inception, and, like Lydia, you are exceptionally well placed to discuss virtually every aspect of RPS development. You have been a university professor of physics and a world renowned contributor to physics theory as well as a social critic and militant activist your entire adult life. You were shadow Vice President during Lydia Luxembourg’s term as president, and later you had your own term as shadow President. Was your initial attraction to RPS similar to Lydia’s or did other facets play a larger role for you? How did you get involved, and why?

For me too, like for Lydia, the multi dimensional aspect and the emphasis on institutional roles were important. But even more important for my early choice to join RPS was its attitude to the economy, and beyond ideas, its moral approach and the specific values it highlighted.

Before I got involved in RPS, I was mainly anti war and internationalist, though I was, like everyone else, also worried about global warming and the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. My activism was anarchistic. I militantly rejected any authority that wasn’t absolutely essential for some specific time-bound reason. I had aggressive faith in human potentials and little time for impersonal dynamics largely beyond our reach. The fact that RPS highlighted human needs and potentials was a strong attraction. However, I was most drawn by the specific value it celebrated for how decisions should occur, and by the centrality RPS gave that value.

RPS called the value that hooked me “self management,” and it is, of course, the by now ubiquitous idea that people should have a say in decisions in proportion as they are affected by them. RPS wasn’t first to espouse self management, but it made its commitment more precise than others had made their’s, and I was moved by that.

I liked how RPS argued against elitist notions of a few people making decisions for everyone. Even more, I liked how RPS found violations of self management not only in dictatorships or in centers of corporate power that bossed around workers and consumers, but also in the dynamics of central planning and markets, various electoral systems, and even typical sexual and family relations and most schooling, not to mention the dynamics of prior left organizations.

Indeed, in those early days of RPS, I saw my calling as seeking self management for all people in every side of life. This got a little problematic in the way Lydia mentioned for how a narrowly feminist allegiance could get problematic. It wasn’t that my feeling that self management was incredibly important was bad—that feeling was correct. What was bad was having one value drive my perceptions so heavily that it crowded out my seeing and assessing other values. In time my activities in RPS got me past that narrowness.

You said you were moved by how RPS found certain less obvious violations of self management and not just self evident ones. Can you give an example that mattered a lot to you?

If an owner can tell employees their hours of work, their pay, and even whether they can take a bathroom break, it obviously violates the workers’ having a say in the decisions that affect them. But less obviously consider this example, which very much affected me when I finally understood it.

Most people fifty years ago felt they freely chose their work by applying for a job and getting it. They felt they freely chose what they consumed by going to the store, or online, and purchasing it. Both seemed true enough. After all, I didn’t have to take a job or to buy particular shoes. I work here or there. I buy this or that. I choose. I self manage.

But if the jobs we get all have certain features we can’t escape or influence, are we really choosing how we will work? Or if the range of items available to consume is tightly constrained and we have no say in that, again, do we really freely choose?

Consider two analogies I heard back then. Imagine you are in prison and go to the commissary and purchase some items. Do you self manage your choice? Well, yes, you do, but also no, you don’t. You certainly decided to go to the commissary and you certainly saw the options and you picked some and not others. However, you had no say in what was and what wasn’t available and yet that largely determined what you wound up with. Outside prison obviously a much wider selection is available, though I saw that it too was horribly constrained by market pressures.

Similarly, when you apply for a job, if you have as your only options to apply for jobs that are subordinate to a boss and paid a wage based on power relations—are you really self managing your choice? Wasn’t the main choice made before you arrived with you having zero input into it?

Or consider one more example. About 90 years ago was called the golden age of capitalism. Let’s call the average productivity per hour at that time golden output. Roughly fifty years later, productivity per person was literally twice golden output. Another forty years to the present and it is now 3 times golden output. This means if the average time of a job per week was 40 hours just under a century back when average productivity per person was called golden, we could have had the same golden output per person in society in 20 hours a week at the start of this century and in about 13 hours a week now. The reduced duration of work would allow the same output per person.

So the question arises, who decided that instead of working hard a half or even a third as long as earlier, we would actually work hard quite a bit longer than earlier generating vastly more output, and, on top of that, that the immense fruits of our labor would be given over to a small percentage of the population or to creating weapons and other useless or harmful outputs? I didn’t decide that. You didn’t decide that. We had no say in that. No one we know had any say in that. In fact, in truth, it is fair to say that no person decided it. Rather, by its roles, market competition imposed that to survive firms had to pursue a profit-seeking path. The institutional context of market allocation took away control over critically important decision making about how long we should work as well as who should get the fruits of our labors.

From these examples, I came to understand more viscerally the prerequisites of self management and the complexity and promise of institutions that would provide rather than curtail it.

What about within the left itself? Was there self management there?

In the period from the 1960s upsurges through, say 2020 or so, the idea of self management certainly existed. It was discussed, it was even elevated to a prime or even the prime status by some, especially, for example, by the anarchists who I identified with, but was it actually operative inside the left?

If you look at activist organizations and projects of the times, for example at media organizations of which there were many, or even at organizing projects and movement organizations like unions, ecology movements, anti war organizations, anti racist, and feminist organizations, there really wasn’t much structural commitment to self management.

Mostly, movement projects looked like other institutions in society. Some people made decisions. Way more people were largely absent from decision making. Donors and fund raisers often had incredible power, just as owners did in mainstream society. People who were analogous to managers, lawyers, and engineers, or, for example, people like editors and publishers in alternative media organizations, also had great power.

When self management went from rhetoric to actual practical changes, it was almost always in a kind of transitory situation, where it was praised but not implanted in lasting structure. Groups would be more or less collective, but it was often a function of people’s attitudes, of their desires that emerged from prior activism or study, but not of structures which ensured their collectivity and self management.

There were massive phenomena, like what was called the Occupy movement, with vast assemblies, and hand votes of all involved often seeking consensus. Yet, even in those, if you looked closely, you would see that relatively few people were really calling the shots, and, more to the point, there were no lasting structural features that could deal with more complex agendas and processes.

Not very long before RPS began to take form was the election of 2016. I am guessing you have probably heard a lot about it from other interviewees. The Sanders campaign said very good things about not being a one-man show and about the paramount importance of grassroots involvement and trying to attain real democracy, but despite those verbal commitments, which I considered sincere, at least from Sanders himself, the overall project was still utilizing old forms of internal organization with a few people deciding everything, and with only at most very vague and unimplemented notions of any alternative.

Debate between tight hierarchical decision making and incredibly loose raised hands decision making with virtually no lasting structure and anyone at all voting, had long had little to do with actual self management. RPS started to confront that on both counts, and to pressure changes not only in society’s election procedures, official accountability, and social relations, but also in movement organizations and projects.

I should mention one other impact. In the anarchist community we had always militantly rejected oversight, hierarchy, and authority. But sometimes this led us in unproductive directions. People would argue their right to do as they please as if others didn’t have a right to be free of impositions imposed by the first group’s preferences. We can riot at big demonstration if we want to, we alone decide our actions, despite that choices could mean others will have to stay away or endure rioting. Or people would argue against having lasting rules, laws, and even collective norms, as if every situation had to emerge anew, spontaneously, with no attention to prior agreements. This sometimes got very self serving, with each argument reflecting only immediate interests of the person making the argument, and with little attention to the interests of others who would be affected.

At any rate, RPS’s clear early enunciation of the logic and some methods for collective self management did a whole lot to focus anarchist values and commitments in ways which were far truer to the early days of anarchism than were the self-centered approaches that had become prevalent for some anarchists before RPS. So RPS actually improved and strengthened my anarchism, and propelled much more and better anarchism from others, as well, even as it also initially aroused opposition from many folks calling themselves anarchist.

You said that another aspect of RPS ideas that attracted you—not just its multi issue approach and its prioritization of institutions, was its approach to the economy. Can you explain that?

Before RPS, leftists, including myself, called a couple of percent or so of the population capitalists because those folks owned the means by which society produces and distributes goods and services, society’s capital. Setting aside small owners, we called non owners employees because those folks owned only their ability to do work which they had to sell to owners to get income to survive. Owners and employees were seen to clash over wages, the length of the work day, the pace of work, work conditions, production choices, national economic policies and more.

RPS felt that if you see only employees and owners, you rightly recognize that the non owners work for owners, but you wrongly miss that about a fifth of the non owners, so a fifth of the employees, have great power and influence due to their position in the economy, while four fifths of the employees have nearly no power and influence, also due to their position in the economy.

This observation that some people who weren’t owners nonetheless had dramatically more power, income, and wealth than other non owners had its origins all the way back with early anarchists well over a century before RPS. But even being aware of that, until RPS got going most activists didn’t understand why this difference existed, and why it meant there were three main classes and not just two.

RPS said that beneath owners and above workers, sits another class. This third class did not own differently than workers since, like workers, members of this third class did not own workplaces and resources. And also like workers, these other non owners were also subordinate to owners. They too worked for wages paid by owners. What put these particular non owners above worker non owners was the different types of tasks each did.

Seeing this class difference was, I think, a graphic instance of utilizing the type of institutional thinking that Lydia mentioned earlier. RPS argued that the division of labor in corporations and throughout modern societies gave about 20 percent of non owners empowering tasks and gave about 80 percent of non owners disempowering tasks. It called the empowered non owners the coordinator class. It called the disempowered non owners the working class. Because of their different tasks, those with empowering roles accrued confidence, social connections, organizational skills, information, time, and disposition to affect affairs and define relations. Those with disempowering roles were habituated to obedience and became fragmented from one another and separated from information. They knew each other but not people with pull. They suffered shortages of time, became exhausted, and became disposed to escape their alienated subordination as much as possible. And you didn’t need a microscope to see this, or a lab to tease it into visibility. IT was in front of everyone’s nose, everywhere.

RPS additionally explained that coordinator class members not only would oversee working class members in capitalist settings, where the former designed the circumstances, issued daily orders, and even to a point healed and mended worker’s below—but they would continue to do so even with owners gone, as long as the same division of labor prevailed. This too wasn’t rocket science, but you did have to think a little and look at some history, unless of course you lived where it occurred. Then it was totally evident.

To me, this last observation shattered many prior beliefs and created new ideas in their place. For example, it shattered my attachment to old forms of post capitalist vision. It made me ask how we might remove the features of economic institutions that give the coordinator class both it’s power and its inclinations to use its power as it does. It made me think about what new institutions could deliver real classlessness.

While RPS was trying to modestly refine radicals’ understandings of race, power, and gender in light of incorporating the impact of each on the rest, regarding economy it undertook a much more ambitious renovation. It not only removed the tendency to over stress economics in a pursuit often called economism, it also sought to get us to see how class division arose not only from ownership relations but also from a corporate division of labor. At first I found it difficult and unfamiliar to understand this in personal human terms and especially in terms of what it meant regarding vision, strategy, and people’s ways of thinking, acting, talking, and writing.

Difficult even though it was all around?

YEs, difficult but not technically hard or obscure. Rather difficult because it was so contrary to familiar thought, including my own. But as I made progress, it became a big part of my becoming deeply committed to the RPS project.

Did it impact your life choices outside RPS?

Actually yes, but not without some resistance from me. I am a physicist. I work in a major university as a professor and also in a lab. In my workplace, well known scientists are paid more, have better conditions, have more influence, and are, indeed, coordinator class. So there was a real issue. Would I continue to accept the many advantages I enjoyed, which had seemed to me like my right, and thus in no way unreasonable, or would I agree to and even join efforts to attain equitable remuneration and balanced job complexes where it would impact me?

Powerful pressures for change in time came from students and newbie scientists, and also from technicians, janitors, and others who worked in traditionally powerless positions that benefitted everyone but did so for far less pay than professors earned and with no say in policies.

At first, pretty much all professors resisted. Honestly, we mostly found it absurd. How could it make any sense for us, given all our experience and training, to do a share of cleaning up? It would mean disaster for science, for physics. In fact, our reaction was wrong even regarding productivity, much less regarding justice. Indeed, the justice part was obvious as soon as one regarded all who were involved as equally worthy human beings. But the productivity part, while it ought to have been similarly evident with just a little thought, only became compelling when it turned out that labs with balanced job complexes were not only much more humane and fulfilling to work in, but because of the reduction of tensions and what I guess some would call “office politics,” were also better at apportioning time and getting tasks done. And if one had eyes for it, one could see they were also vastly better at teaching the next generation.

So, yes, I became an advocate not only in theory, but in my own realm as well, albeit with some delay, but a lot faster and more thoroughly, though I wish that weren’t true, than for most others in comparable coordinator roles.

Look, we all lived in a diseased world in which it was impossible for anyone to be fully human or humane. One way or another, everyone who lived in that world was maladjusted. The roles did that. To be flawed was no crime. To ignore the flaws after they became evident—that was a problem.

Lydia, were you as attracted to RPS’s elevation of values as Bert was? And did RPS’s new attitudes toward class play a role for you as well?

I suspect almost everyone who relates to RPS was at least in considerable part moved by its emphasis on values, and, yes, I was too. But for me I think it was RPS’s emphasis on diversity as a basic value that had most initial impact. My coming at things as a strong feminist already disposed me toward recognizing the incredible range of life patterns bearing on sexuality, nurturance, and bringing up children. The fact that RPS highlighted and celebrated diversity was critical for me. When I came to understand diversity as emanating just as logically from an ecological orientation, that too helped broaden my thinking.

The notion of solidarity, which is also a central value of RPS, was, like self management, certainly not original. RPS didn’t come up with the idea that people ought to feel solidarity and even empathy with other people. That was long since familiar to people seeking good social outcomes. It was the way RPS coupled making values central with understanding institutions that impressed me.

For a value like solidarity, we were pushed by our institutional approach to ask what current social roles impede or even annihilate people feeling solidarity? And, as well, what would have to happen for society’s various institutions to accomplish their desirable functions and yet also foster solidarity?

And the same thing happened for diversity and self management. With the values in hand, we had a criteria for judging institutions. Did market competition with buyers and sellers fleecing each other create solidarity? Of course not, but in RPS our concepts pushed us to ask why markets failed at that and to consider what we could do about it.

Similarly, did families with a male operating with father duties and a female operating with mother duties, each of them having contrary roles, foster self management or solidarity in the adults or in their children? No. Okay, then what could we do about that?

I hadn’t been immersed in the ownership-is-the-lynchpin-for-understanding mindset, so the revelation that RPS delivered regarding class relations didn’t uproot my views as much as it did many other leftists’ views, though it was certainly important for me, as it was for Bert, and played a key role in my activism.

Actually, we are uncovering, I think, one of the things about RPS that I am most entranced by. Every aspect is entwined with the rest. RPS’s understanding of class isn’t somehow isolated from RPS’s understanding of sexuality or gender or race, and vice versa.

In real societies, RPS says that what happens in the economy has implications for everyone who fills economic roles because economic roles require us to behave in certain ways and respect and implement a certain logic. And it says  this holds for any economy, not just for the capitalism that RPS struggles to replace, but for the new economy it favors, as well.

And RPS says the same thing holds for the institutions of kinship and the ways their roles require certain kinds of behavior from people bringing up kids and relating to one another in families. Kinship roles require that people behave in certain ways, respect and implement a certain logic, and so on.

What RPS notes is that economy affects our assumptions, circumstances, beliefs, and habits, and in turn we bring all these effects with us after work and beyond consumption, for example, when we are at the dinner table, or in bed, or celebrating holidays, or voting. And similarly, exactly the same holds for kinship’s impact on men, women, and children. Here too the effects are not confined to when we are inside families or with friends, but also travel with us into workplaces, places of worship, malls, and voting booths.

So, RPS emphasizes how the social and behavioral field of influence emanating from any one key area of society tends to require that other key areas abide and sometimes even incorporate elements of its logic into their own relations. RPS shows, in other words, how societies push and pull into a more or less stable entwined mosaic of all their key parts—as well as how this mosaic can become unstable, and can even be unraveled to become entirely transformed. What’s more, it raises the question what new mosaic of what new parts do we desire to implement?

So it wasn’t only that I became aware of this third class existing in its birth area—the economy—it was that I became aware of it in all sides of life, including implications for families, religion, and so on.

Bert, what about the last key social value that RPS was initially emphasizing? Did equity as a value also resonate for you?

I was slower to take to the last RPS value then I was to favor balanced job complexes and I suspect this was due to my defending deeply held but not fully thought out prior beliefs.

RPS says a person should get an income, which is actually a share of the total social product, in accord with the duration, intensity, and onerousness of the socially valued labor they do. If you work longer, harder, or under worse conditions making things people want, RPS says you deserve to receive more. But it also says you do not deserve to receive more for having special talents or for working in some area that is more valued than another, or for working with tools that increase your output, much less for owning property or for simply having power to take more. One way to think of it is you get remunerated for your effort and sacrifice. Another way to think of it is that each person should enjoy a combination of leisure and work which, overall, should afford the same total benefits minus debits as every other person’s mix of leisure and work.

In 2045, for all members of RPS, and for most other socially engaged people as well, whatever label for this aim one favors, this approach to income seems natural and even obvious. But when RPS was just getting started, that wasn’t the case.

Having come from an anarchist tradition, I had always believed in the guiding precept “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” That slogan was a cornerstone of my radical identity and I vigorously defended it more like one would defend a family relative, literally, than an idea. So I first heard the RPS formulation as a step back from and even an attack on a central component of my radical identity, not as a serious issue for discussion and understanding.

At any rate, as an idea, at least in its intent, the anarchist norm was actually quite similar to the RPS view, but the anarchist norm assumed without describing it that there would also be an accompanying economic arrangement that would allow the norm to operate well. However this assumption was made as a kind of dogma, or first principle, without thinking closely about the actual features needed to attain the desired effects.

Additionally, the anarchist norm took for granted that having rules about work and consumption that limit options for each person in light of social circumstances is intrinsically alienating and oppressive. Later, to think that came to seem quite strange. After all, why shouldn’t my connections with others impact my options as well as theirs? Earlier views I had about this eventually seemed to me strangely anti social, even though that was of course not my earlier intent. And yes, this of course harks back to what I said earlier about the impact of the RPS view of self management on anarchism’s understanding of its own values.

At any rate, for me, at the time, the anarchist norm as I then understood it meant that we should each do what we can with our talents to contribute to society because that is the right thing to do—and, likewise, we should each receive from society what we need, like everyone else, because that is the right thing for society to provide. But while that was my feeling about it, RPS caused me to ask myself, what does this superficially delightful norm literally mean if we try to implement it in real relations rather than only use it as a rhetorical place holder for broad hopes about outcomes?

Even regarding the intended goal—and ignoring that the anarchist norm offered no institutional mechanisms to attain it—as RPS made a case for its new approach, I began to realize that while I liked the anarchist slogan for its connotations, I hadn’t seriously examined its meaning.

Work to ability? Okay, who will say what my or your ability is? Consume to need? Okay, who will say what my or your need is?

If this norm says someone else will determine my ability or need other than me, then it foregoes all its anti authoritarian connotations. But if it says that I am free to determine my ability however I choose, which means I can choose how much I should work and at what tasks, and that I am free to determine how much I should consume of what items, and if it says there should be no say in these determinations for anyone or anything beyond myself, then the norm translates to saying that I can have for consumption whatever I decide to take and I can work however much or little I choose, at whatever job I choose. There is an implicit assumption or hope, no doubt, that I will choose wisely, but there are no constraints, no requirements, and even no mechanisms to facilitate my being wise.

As the alternative RPS approach slowly gained traction, I realized my anarchist “from each to each” norm had two central problems. The first was rather obvious and people would often discuss and argue about it. The other was more subtle, and up to the emergence of RPS, it was rarely raised, though once considered, it was clearly crucial.

The first problem was, we can’t all compatibly take what we want and produce what we choose. On the one hand, producing what we choose, with no attention to how well we are able to do it, is a problem because people may choose to do things they cannot do well. But even if we ignore that serious difficulty and assume we will each only want to produce things we can produce well, why can’t I take a tremendous amount from output, and produce little or perhaps nothing? The maxim says do as you will, so, why can’t I do that? So the maxim’s first problem is if people strictly obey it and opt for the best result for themselves with no concern for the effect on others which effect they have no information about in any case, then society unravels due to there being way too much demand and way too little supply.

In response, the from each to each maxim’s advocates would typically qualify it to accord better with their intentions. They might say their maxim really means that we should take what is fair, given our needs, and we should produce what is fair and needed, given our abilities, where the latter includes only doing work that we do well enough so our product is socially valued. Indeed, the above is literally the pattern of thoughts I had when first confronted by RPS advocates. I wanted to retain my link to the slogan that I thought was at the heart of anarchism’s logic, but I realized that I could retain my allegiance to the anarchist norm only if I qualified it. But my attempts fell short and the RPS folks were relentless. I was forced to recognize that even with the fix, there was still a problem. How would I know what is fair? For that matter, what does fair even mean?

What if someone says that in their view fair is to receive income equal to what their property produces? Or, fair is to receive income equal to how much society values their personal product? No anarchist would abide either view nor would any advocate of RPS. But how does the “from each to each” maxim rule these choices out? Further, whatever I decide is fair, how do I manage to make choices that implement it?

RPS convinced me that the ethically desirable and economically sound choice for what is fair is that people should get income for how long they work, how hard they work, and the onerousness of the conditions under which they work, as long as their work is socially desired. But RPS added that in practice, none of us can make this assessment unless we engage with one another in production and consumption in ways that reveal what people want and how much they want it.

This last observation was critical for me. The dispute wasn’t only about ethics. It was also and even mainly about what information had to be available for people to be able to be ethical. That was when I decided that the RPS norm was consistent with my anarchist desires for equitable outcomes, but that unlike “from each to each” the RPS norm was able to generate the desired outcomes by revealing needed information rather than obscuring it. I would later realize there was more, that is, the information was also needed for society to orient its future production sensibly in light of changing desires, but the above is what got me initially.

I have been asking folks to recount an event or campaign or situation during the rise of RPS that was particularly inspiring or meaningful for them. Could you do so too, please

Aside from all the major RPS campaigns and events molding me, I have to acknowledge a particular long running experience. When I was about 18, I guess in 1984, visiting with a girlfriend at the time, listening to music, she played me the album Another Side of Bob Dylan. It was playing, we were enjoying each other, but then the sound started to take over my mind. I don’t know what else to say. I was not one to have a song distract me from anything else, much less 18 year old enjoyments, but it started happening, and then I heard “Chimes of Freedom,” and I was in thrall.

I later listened not only to that album but to a whole lot of Bob Dylan, over and over. I poured over certain lyrics until I could hear them fully, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Ah, get born, keep warm, short pants, romance, learn to dance, get blessed, try to be a success…” I didn’t just look the lyrics up via Google. I wanted to hear them as first listeners did, decades earlier. Some songs I heard fine right off, others I had to hear repeatedly to begin to get a hold of.

I think it was the first time something so cerebral was also so emotive for me. I have to admit, I think Dylan was the main literary engagement I ever undertook. And I truly do believe that my experience of his words and music significantly contoured my life journey and especially my revolutionary desires about as much as anything else did.

I could talk about song after song and its impact on me. I assume that I often read my feelings into them, but a great song achieves that. Someday I hope to write about his words and their impact, but for now, if it is okay, just one more bit on it, here.

Of course many of Dylan’s songs opened me to the breadth and depth of injustices in society, to the dangers its structure imposed, to the insanity, to the hypocrisy, and to hope as well. To what he called “society’s pliers”—its roles—that bend us out of shape. But less known, Dylan also observed critics of injustice, and as on most topics, he was way before his time, conveying insights way beyond what his actual involvement and awareness of activism would seem to have permitted. Somehow he seemed to tap into wisdom that he didn’t even himself own. I don’t know where he got it, or how he mined it. I always wondered if he could express it in dialog, in simple terms, remotely as he did in song and sometimes poems, but I always doubted he could—which to me was and remains a bit of a mystery.

Consider this, as one passage of many. It is from the song “Farewell Angelina” and to my ears it is Dylan not only bidding a very gentle goodbye to Joan Baez, but also a not very gentle goodbye to the tumultuous movements then growing around the country which Baez admirably wished to and did still relate to—and he left for reasons that activists in those movements should have heard, and which I think RPS, later, in some sense did hear.

The machine guns are roaring

The puppets heave rocks

The fiends nail time bombs

To the hands of the clocks

Call me any name you like

I will never deny it

Farewell Angelina

The sky is erupting

I must go where it’s quiet

For him, we were the puppets, even the fiends. And he did seek quiet. And the movements of the day largely lost their best political wordsmith, their best political troubadour, though Dylan’s social brilliance went on and on.

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