RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 284 NAR 2: First Breaths, From Family, Trump, Soccer, Marches, Sit Downs, Conversion, War and More into RPS
Episode 284 of RevolutionZ presents chapter two (of fourteen) of An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. It relates personal precursors of revolutionary participatory society through the life experiences of interviewees Alexandra Voline, Andre Goldman, and Senator Malcolm King who discuss with their interviewer, Miguel Guevara, all from their own world their personal trajectories into activism including the first major march, the early gun and militarism boycotts, overcoming early resistance and doubt, achieving early momentum, and much much more on the road to forming and working toward Revolutionary Participatory Society in the U.S. And yes, that is a whole lot which is why this episode is by far the longest so far at four minutes under two hours. (See the long list of topics below -- to get them, I skimmed the earlier article on ZNet, excerpt two of the serialization and grabbed here and there. It could have gone on and on...lives are big things and so is revolution....)
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is the second episode in the new Next American Revolution sequence NAR sequence, and it is based on the second excerpt from the work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. The title of this episode is Next American Revolution 2, first Breaths. As with each new entry, it includes spontaneous interjections by me offering questions, comments, elaborations and clarifications that I add as I speak and hear the material aloud to record it for the podcast. This is the podcast. This is the second. The first is on Z and the second will be, and the second essay is on Z. The combination of article and episode each week, which I'm trying to do, ventures into very unusual territory for me. Each article excerpt is to be placed Monday or Tuesday. Each follow-up augmented audio version is to be made live on Revolution Z the following Sunday. My hope is to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke and contribute to discussions about vision and especially about strategy for social change. For such conversations, please consider using the Znet Discord system that you can reach from the Znet top page. As to the content, you may want to only listen to the audio, or you may prefer to hear the audio after, or perhaps even before, reading the text. The audio will contain considerable additional material.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, in this episode that presents Chapter 2 of An Oral History of the Next American Revolution, interviewees Alexandra Valleen, andre Goldman and Senator Malcolm King discuss with their interviewer, miguel Guevara, the first major march, the early boycotts, overcoming early resistance and achieving early momentum on the road to forming and working toward revolutionary participatory society in the US. Last time we got things going with a typical length episode. I don't know. I think I remember it being about 35-40 minutes, something like that. This time, fair warning, I think this is likely to be the longest episode of Revolutionary Z I've ever done, and that includes longer than all 283 prior episodes and perhaps quite a bit longer even than that. Time will tell and I guess it will do so in more ways than one. The duration will be the key one. So, to start under a heading that says First Gatherings and Rallies, miguel Guevara asks Alexandra. I already interject the names of the interviewer and interviewees throughout the work. All have intentions. Alexandra is for Kalantai, very important Russian workers', opposition leader and feminist, and Volin is for Volin, spelled, I think, without the E also Russian, but an anarcho-syndicalist. Check out, for example, his book the Unknown Revolution.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the opening question of this chapter goes on Alexandra, you are a well-known militant feminist who became politically engaged roughly in parallel with the emergence of RPS. You have been a workplace and union organizer and you are revered for your effective advocacy of nonviolent tactics and your outreach to people holding seriously contrary views. You have been centrally involved with RPS from its earliest days and you recently became its shadow secretary of labor. To start, I wonder if you would tell us how you first became radical. Well, honestly, miguel, I didn't have much choice.
Speaker 1:I was brought up in a family with radical parents who had been born into the 60s scene and who became young members of the then SDS Students for a Democratic Society. They fought against the war in Indochina and they fought for feminism. They were precocious activists and I guess they thought I should be precocious too. My mom became a community organizer who worked in the movements for the city, and my dad was an auto worker and union activist with the UAW who became active in the green social transformation of that industry. Because of them, by the time I entered high school, I already had radical insights and beliefs, but I didn't quite have the drive that propels sustained commitment when Donald Trump was elected. It was so utterly insane that it made me ill. And well, there was a bridge near where I was living and I thought about flying off it. I thought a few seconds of free flight would be better than decades of suffering what such a lunatic could unleash. I was that sickened by Trump, as were my parents, who wondered if he was the rotten fruit of their life's work. Imagine my dad, eyes wide open, wondering how some of his autoworker friends could support such a barbaric character. My mom wondering is this really what we are passing on to our daughter? Trump's vile presence also seriously upset my community of radically inclined friends, but to my eyes, too many seemed more intent on preserving some kind of personal radical stance than on collectively moving forward.
Speaker 1:Trump's election was the first and last time I ever got fall-down drunk, and my dissolution lasted many weeks. Honestly, I felt the oceans would overflow. I felt the sky would burn. I felt beaten and washed up on a rotten shore. Friends had to rouse me for my bed-hugging depression. Thankfully, an emerging resistance rekindled my hope. I still wonder where other folks got the wherewithal to dissent, even while I was still wallowing. Without the example of their resistance, I don't know where the hell I would have wound up, but certainly not talking with you here today.
Speaker 1:I knew that Trump was a product of our society and a gigantic aberration only in being as uncouth and extreme as he was To me, he seemed an insane genius at inducing insanity in others and he scared the shit out of me. My hatred for him gave me some anger-driven passion, but alone, I doubt that would have kept me going. I interject what would you have, asked Alexandra at this point? Miguel asked so why did you become everlastingly radical? Why didn't you pursue conventional success or well, just wallow? For one thing, I despise convention. Dinner parties, limos, money and mansions repulsed me. Why seek that much less impoverished passivity? Love and dignity attracted me, but seemed out of reach. Miguel replied. I became a dissident journalist with similar feelings, but there must have been some key events that attracted you, that prevented permanent wallowing or seeking only for self.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us what were some of the high-point events of RPS? Not for others or for history, but for you. It's a hard question, miguel. Can we really describe our own turning points? I doubt it, I am not a very introspective person, but in hindsight I'd have to say the campaign for the 30-hour week that got visibly moving in 2026, and for worker participation and decision-making that took off in 2027, and I would guess that the first two RPS conventions probably had the most inspiring effect on who I politically became. They schooled me, but, more personally, two influences were critical for me. That may not be on the map of RPS history for anyone else.
Speaker 1:I had not, long before, been greatly inspired by the outpouring of student anger against the genocidal Israeli assault on Palestinians' very existence. I didn't feel anything but disdain for Hamas, but I felt intense pain for Palestinians. But I was astounded by the student support inside the US for the Palestinian struggle and, I have to be honest, also by the simultaneous support of many for Israel, which support terrified me for what it said about people's capacities to lose track of reality and even of their own values. Mostly, though, I think the ability of those demonstrating to feel such empathy, such intensely emotional and caring militancy for Palestinians, kept me moving left. Emotional and caring militancy for Palestinians kept me moving left, and then, somewhat later, came the two experiences I mentioned. The first was negative. It was a meeting that the then fledgling RPES had with workers in a defense plant that was associated with a campus where students were fighting against military ties and research.
Speaker 1:It was the early days of that struggle and I spoke in a large auditorium to protesting students, but also to the plant's defense-oriented employees. I was so nervous and angry that when I got up to speak I was literally trembling. I called for closing the workplace. I mean, really me, a hyped up, trembling kid. I hollered at everyone War kills, weapons kill, killing, fucking kills. Shut it down, rise up and shut it down. I evidenced no concern for the workers' future livelihoods because, honestly, I didn't give that a thought. I had warfare on my mind here. I was telling them to shut down their military work and yet, even as I did so, I ignored the situation of those dependent on the military's contracts.
Speaker 1:A cocky kid with none of their problems or insights. I railed at those workers as if they were warmongering enemies of peace because they hadn't rushed out to join student protests that would, as they were then formulated, have left them unemployed. One of the workers in the audience yelled back at me you want to steal my livelihood. You ignore my needs. What about my family. You should shut the fuck up. I heard him sort of, but I didn't even pause. However, at least as I remember it, even as I was doing that, even caught up in the moment and arrogantly offering the workers a suicidal notion of what solidarity with we students, much less what solidarity with those being killed by their products, required, I was oblivious. But when he yelled, shut the fuck up, I felt ill at ease. I interject. I hear that and I remember a great many situations like it. Somewhere I was wearing her shoes or someone I appreciated was. Does it ring familiar to you hearing this now too?
Speaker 1:The episode, alexandra, continues. Later, I saw a video of what I had done and I was seriously distressed by it and violently angry at myself for having done it. My talk there was the kind of thing radicals and revolutionaries often get caught up in Our eyes would focus on being correct, on being holier than thou, on being revolutionary. We would watch those who agreed with us cheer us, but we'd ignore the conditions and feelings of those we were supposedly trying to reach. This kind of activism repeatedly made working people so angry that they would completely dismiss our substance due to our apparent disdain for them. The employees justifiably hated me, and I had much to learn.
Speaker 1:It was damned hard to listen to people who had such contrary views. It was torture to hear their experiences. Might I get sucked into feeling like them? I don't want that. So why listen? Why feel? But I tried and in time I did both. They led and I learned and, of course, movements against war-making learned that lesson as well. Miguel replies. Some didn't learn that lesson so fast and so early. I didn't, I admit, but now perhaps your retelling it all will help spread the awareness further.
Speaker 1:But you said a second event also particularly stirred you. Yes, who knows why we learn what we do? Perhaps I saw somewhere in my unconscious my parents frowning at my actions. Whatever, for the second personal event, I was at a memorial service held for civil rights activists from past years. It was part of countless events that had their origins in the historic Black Lives Matter actions of 2020 and again later. In any case, the music and solidarity combined to transport me until I had, I guess, a kind of a psychotic break or something. I don't know what it was, but I suddenly saw myself on the streets of Birmingham, alabama, where I had never been. I could see Bill Connor, who I had never seen in action. I could see the activists who risked life and limb for change. I even saw my parents there, though they were then too young to have been there.
Speaker 1:Shook up by all that, I reread Martin Luther King Jr's letter froma Birmingham jail and his more famous mountaintop speech. As a child my parents had read both to me. I liked it that they read stuff like that to me. Especially, I liked that they took me seriously. But beyond that it was no big deal Ancient history. But then when I read it later, spurred on by my hallucinatory experience, I found the words incredibly inspiring. I even memorized them and later, when in jail or risking jail or even choosing not to risk jail, I would repeat the speeches to myself in my head and when I had the chance I would convey them to others.
Speaker 1:Even absent, mlk became a kind of guide and mentor for me. I could hear him saying, quote I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law. But I have longed to hear white ministers declare follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother. His words made me think about how inaction was support for repression. It made me think of how Howard Zinn, another favorite of my parents, who wrote you can't be neutral on a moving train. It made me think of a campaign commercial for Bernie Sanders that I had seen. Sanders appeared in it and asked his viewers if they could fight as hard for others who they did not even know as they could fight for themselves. He said if we can do that, we can win. I was shocked to hear that sentiment from my TV. I remember crying a little. Sanders, too, opened me up. I interject A lesser instance.
Speaker 1:Yet I did find myself in the tea room of my parents' house, yet lying on the floor feeling I was in a field in Vietnam. Anything like that in your life. Different strokes for different folks. But is any of this familiar? The episode continues. What can you tell us, alexandra, about the first signs of RPS? This is difficult because I would imagine some folks would trace aspects of RPS's start back decades further, if not longer, to Alexandra Kalantai, for example, who I think my parents named me for, or perhaps to Mikhail Bakunin and so many others. But my impression was that significant numbers of people began to have what became RPS-type unity in mind.
Speaker 1:Roughly 20 years ago, I remember my own first feeling occurred at a rally in Detroit about raising the minimum wage and also curbing police violence. I went with my young daughter. It was a nice day, a calm crowd and everyone enjoyed the camaraderie that was typical of such events. Nothing new in that. Yet standing in the sun, listening, I felt that something exceeding the two stated priorities was happening, something unusual, at least to my ears. Various speakers explained how low minimum wages and recurring police violence were part of a larger encompassing dynamic of oppression and denigration. Police violence were part of a larger encompassing dynamic of oppression and denigration. Speakers linked class, race, gender and sexuality to the wage and police violence issues emphasized that day and vice versa. End police violence, clean the damn water, raise wages, wage peace, keep at it, win the world. I had heard such linkages before, not least from my parents, but this time the speakers explicitly added that ultimately everything had to be renovated for anything to comprehensively and irredeemably change. They weren't just talking about what's right, but about what could work. A few speakers explicitly urged the need for mutual aid and organizational continuity among people's many focuses. Some even offered ideas for what a movement of movements needed to structurally include to literally raise rages, reduce police violence and especially win new social relations.
Speaker 1:I had attended quite a few prior rallies and demonstrations, but I had always felt that, despite people's passionate rhetoric, what they were doing was time, issue and place bound. I had heard uplifting, powerful, courageous and inspiring rhetoric, but when sobriety returned, I had often regretfully felt that the rousing words lacked follow-up substance. It was a good show, but then what? Back home, back to Netflix, I interject. You ever felt like Alexandra Nice, but where is it going? Back to life and life only. Is anyone hearing this? In an encampment preparing to go home for the summer. What about more, alexandra continues?
Speaker 1:When Trump was elected, our activist priority, even while many of us were starting to ask for more, even while desires for more were growing, understandably became largely to stop him from bludgeoning us into the past. Thinking about that, I realized that for decades, activism had typically emphasized ending ubiquitous ugliness and thwarting horrible intentions. But the rally in Detroit didn't just say familiar things about what is wrong. It also said new things about what could be. And what can I say I wanted in. So I think those were my turning points towards what would become RPS, and even more than the ideas that circulated that day.
Speaker 1:I think what attracted me was a no-surrender feeling in the air. It transcended verbal artistry and it certainly wasn't macho posturing. It was calm, it was informed. It urged that we should have our eyes on winning fundamental gains in addition to preventing imminent losses. And people knew it would be a long struggle. Maybe my memory embroidered the event, but I don't think so.
Speaker 1:That rally helped attune me to winning, beyond just surviving. It delivered something that I needed. But what about you, miguel? What got you into journalism and then also RPS? I was in college, gleefully headed for a football soccer future. I was good, actually very good, but the competitive, macho coaches and most players drove me away from what I loved. Then the eye-opening revelations of those times, the pandemic and its grotesque priorities, the demonstrating against police and then against racism writ large, the stark threat of genocide and the readings that I followed all that up with, all together took me into activism. And from there it was not a long leap to join RPS. But come on Alexandria. I am the interviewer, you are the interviewee.
Speaker 1:So while many pinpoint the 2028 march of a million and maybe even more than a million protesters on Wall Street as their RPS starred, not you, were you there. My personal turning point was that earlier, smaller Detroit rally. But yes, the leader march on Wall Street had that same feeling and it certainly inspired many more people than the earlier rally. And yes, I was there and, as nervous as I was, I was in the ridiculously long line of speakers and I even gave my first speech to a big crowd. I remember it well.
Speaker 1:I said we seek dignity and justice. We won't settle for the periphery of power. We do not oppose impoverished budgets, escalating inequality, resurgent racism, sexual predation, assembly line schools, corporate profiteering, divisive classism, hideous repression, heinous war or planetary climate catastrophe. No, we oppose it all. We don't demand racial solidarity, cultural integrity. We don't demand racial solidarity, cultural integrity, gender equity, sexual diversity, political freedom, collective self-management, peace and ecological sanity, or economic equity and classlessness. No, we demand it all. We don't want old bosses and we don't want new ones either. And you're right.
Speaker 1:I remember at the Wall Street March feeling part of something much bigger that was just getting going. That march to the organizational center of economic depravity addressed income distribution and corporations, but it also addressed abortion rights, racism and war and the still strong and very seriously accelerating need for ecological sanity that rally's emergent diverse community was starting to define itself. Connections were being made and spreading. It felt like I was inside a young but growing organism. Why, alexandra? What, in particular, made you feel that way? All I can offer is that, on the surface, the Wall Street march delivered focused dissent and excellent demands, but underneath that, the speakers, the arrangements and the confidence made many of us feel we were collectively defining our connections to each other and our attitudes to society. There was good substance, as usual, but there was also good feeling. No wonder so many people were first inspired there. My speech had more, and others, like it occurred, more eloquent, but even those few words I said and quoted to you revealed how we were traveling toward the soon to be encompassing ethos of RPS. I felt the Wall Street march's size and confidence. Being there gave me optimism, but if you had told me then that a decade and a half later I would be secretary of labor in a shadow government created by an organization that would help transform society forever, I would have left. Luckily, I would have been wrong. I interject. Life is like a box of chocolates, except for some. We get to not only taste them but pack them into the box.
Speaker 1:The episode continues with Miguel addressing a new RPS-er, andre Goldman. You are an economist and activist. You have been involved with RPS since its origin. You have held various movement jobs, while writing a bunch of books and many, many articles and teaching in various institutions. You have also continually helped revise RPS program and vision. Do you remember your own radicalization?
Speaker 1:When I was in college, I got into economics as a major. I am not sure why the hell that happened. I had been into math and science, but I think I felt that I wasn't quite smart enough for those pursuits and as well, I wanted a more worldly involvement. But there was a fly in the ointment. My economics classmates eagerly did equations and recited pat answers about supply and demand. They argued about government spending and private investment. They solved this and that equation Me. I just got bored To my eyes, right or wrong.
Speaker 1:My mates were ignorant wannabe wonks who studied blindly with other wannabe wonks. Why the hell did they do that? Oh, in truth, I actually tried to be like them. Why couldn't I do what they did? I took course after course until I could recite acceptable answers to sterile questions. But I had no idea what working in a corporation was like, or even how a corporation functioned. To my thinking, it was as if a medical doctor knew a lot of biochemistry or, perhaps even more aptly, knew a whole bunch of irrelevant but complicated self-help maxims but didn't know what lungs are, much less how to treat sick ones. Really, I felt it was about that bad.
Speaker 1:What economists thought and taught seemed to me to reflect their allegiances, but not serious, open-minded investigation of reality's contours. They parroted their predecessors. Critical thought was on permanent sabbatical. I interject. Me and Andre had some things in common. I went to grad school in economics and felt much as Andre did. I learned to mimic their talk regarding the macroeconomy so I could seem like I was right on board. Yet in fact I neither knew nor particularly cared what the words I would utter in conversation with my professors meant. And for the micro half of economics, I understood it. I could do the problems, but I thought it was ludicrous. As far as theorizing actual relations, andre continues.
Speaker 1:I was radicalized during my final college years by major campaigns against militarism. But before that, not long after arriving at school, I remember I went to a particular militant demonstration, mostly just curious, mostly just to spectate. But then, to my surprise, I agreed with what various speakers said and I admired their willingness to take such a visible public stand. The speaker's passion was contagious. But though I watched and I respected, I didn't join. It was all quite new to me and after I left I wondered what it meant to watch something, admire it, respect it, feel happy it was happening and yet not join in more fully, suddenly become a card-carrying lefty. But I did feel embarrassed that I had stood silent. Even as I admired what I saw, I did feel I had avoided responsibility. I even felt some shame about it, I guess, and it gnawed at me. But still I hesitated to become active.
Speaker 1:I think at some level I felt if I got really political, if I pointed out injustices, I would get in arguments and even in fights. I would annoy others, I would lose friends. I didn't want that, but you finally did all that. So what happened? Maybe I finally realized that having new friends based on me being true to myself mattered more than losing some prior friends due to disagreeing with them about seeking change. Or maybe I just drifted into it, I don't know. But in any event, whatever got me past my resistance to being political before long.
Speaker 1:The 2027 Schools for People campaign roused me. And then the 2028 Olympia refinery takeover made the prospect of actually winning fundamental change real for me. I guess that's what really made me revolutionary. Miguel asked do you remember those? Yes, should I set the scene? Miguel continued, of course, go ahead.
Speaker 1:At the Olympia refinery plant, occupiers blocked access, supporters rallied just beyond, a fancily dressed elderly owner glared down. Drones flew over. I can still remember the owner scream at us my workers, my company, my machines, my product. You earn what I pay you. You produce what I tell you. That's how it is. I boss, you obey. Now move your lazy asses out of my way.
Speaker 1:One of the strikers replied no, we work for our families, for our community, for ourselves, not for you. We will get worthy pay, respect and a say, and we will get ecological sanity as well. That's how it will be. And then another striker said we will not violate nature any longer. We will not move. Not you, not your scabs, not anyone else will refine oil here ever again. Your drones don't intimidate us. Your commands won't move us. Your wealth doesn't scare us. Your time is over. It is you who will move. No more bossing, no more rising oceans and howling hurricanes. No more you. Henceforth, we are converting this workplace to produce solar panels. Stay on and work for a participatory workplace with us or get the hell out. The future will be what we make it, not what you dictate.
Speaker 1:How could I not be profoundly moved hearing that those workers knew so much that my economics teachers didn't have an inkling about, and they knew it more deeply. It was real for them. They were real, so that was a pivotal event for me. Ultimately, I decided that when I thought something was right and if I believed that I could further it, then I should do so. I think that inclination likely had a big impact on my joining the various boycott efforts. What also comes to mind was that when I graduated, with the boycott campaigns raging fiercely, I finally visited some workplaces to test whether my economics training was as bereft of wisdom as I thought. That was another irreversible turning point, because I realized my training was worse even than I had thought.
Speaker 1:I watch people doing various rote jobs. Then I listen to them, tell me what the jobs did to them. This was news to me. But how could it be news? Wasn't it at the core of economics? Wasn't it utterly obvious that work not only affects products but also affects those who do it. So any theory of work should include great attention to its effects on workers. Of work should include great attention to its effects on workers. Assembly line work produces cars, but also exhausted and beaten down workers. I saw what other jobs, like being a manager, did to other people. This was real economics, not fictitious stories or sterile equations, and the jolting, palpable experience of it intensified my radicalization.
Speaker 1:I interject the point here is that abstraction can be very useful and even essential to get understanding at all, to get to the essence and not get lost in peripheral details. But abstraction can also leave out important aspects that matter greatly, even aspects that matter most or would to anyone who wasn't in fact trying to leave out what matters most but is uncomfortable or even contrary to paymasters' needs. Miguel responds to Andrea's memories. I reported on the events in Olympia. I watched the workers redefine their lives in awe at their wisdom and courage, and it so inspired me that I joined RPS. I was a journalist already, but because of them I was no longer a bystander.
Speaker 1:What was your path to joining? Can you tell us what events in RPS history most affected you personally? I don't think I can rank them, but I was incredibly inspired by the Public Schools for the People campaign and a little later by the Amazon sit-down strike and the support it garnered and spinoffs it inspired. In each case, I got to see the action and feel the spirit. The joy and courage of the people involved were incredibly infectious. I mean, really envision it.
Speaker 1:I am in a high school auditorium. Parents, community people and teachers are at a meeting that the parents demanded. The principal says what do you want from us? We teach your children, we house them. I am a good principal. Damn it. Let me educate your kids. For Christ's sake, be grateful. Our school is what it is. Where's your gratitude? Go home. Envision parent after parent rising to speak, often haltingly, always emotively. I graduated eighth grade, reported one, no high school, nothing more for me. Can you understand that life out in the world is all too lonely? Community out there is too often little more than looking for mall sales and avoiding scams and greed. So yes, I would like to have a center here in my children's school where I could learn and socialize at night.
Speaker 1:Another Rosen said I heard something once I want roses on my table, not diamonds on my neck. I like that. Fuck the diamonds. I want to talk to someone who wants to talk to me. That's the roses. So why are schools empty at night and why are they like factories or prisons by day? Still, another parent stood and said we want education, not warehousing. We want a community center where we can all learn. For Christ's sake, indeed, you wake the hell up. And then another parent said teachers want better wages, and they are right. And we want better access, and we are right. Can you even hear us? Do you even try to hear us? We want a second home, right here in this building. Our school isn't what it could be. It isn't what it could be. We are going to make it over. We are going to make it ours.
Speaker 1:I had tears in my eyes as the audience erupted in militant glee. The phrase it isn't what it could be reverberated in me. I heard that and more like that, and I thought no shit, these folks know, they know, they experience, they live what phony economics denies. Not only should public schools really benefit kids and their parents too, but so should colleges teach truths. And then, regarding the Amazon strike, while I wasn't an employee, I did line up outside and support.
Speaker 1:The courage those workers showed was remarkable. To sit down and tell the owners, police and the state that they simply would not be moved short of their winning dignity and income was phenomenal. How could I order from Amazon and ignore that? On the other hand, how could I not order from Amazon? Some big changes were clearly needed, really big ones, and deep down everyone knew it. I remember there was this constant effort to break the workers' spirit. One of the techniques was a steady flow of rumors about gangs coming to attack them, but nonstop outside support put the lie to that. I saw that all the people involved were not following, they were leading. They were altogether the source of energy, altogether they set the tone. The strike was theirs to its core. The participants were militant but also compassionate. Years earlier, big strikes had had lots of Trumpist participants. No more. These Amazon workers danced and fought. They weren't RPS yet, but not many harbored illusions to rationalize fascist behavior.
Speaker 1:Both these experiences were exemplary for all who participated or even just heard about them, and for whatever reasons. Each of these experiences one in communities, one in workplaces touched me and not only me particularly deeply. It wasn't long after that when inspiring events and campaigns arrived almost daily. Each one moved me further than the last, because each always built on what had gone before and foreshadowed what was still to come. Yet something about those two early experiences stuck with me always. So even now, when you ask, I answer with them. I interject On hearing this. The intent, the lessons that arise seem clear enough, but one maybe was way understated.
Speaker 1:Andre reported the school's principal's words, quote what do you want from us? We teach your children, we house them. I am a good principal, damn it. Let me educate your kids. For God's sake, be grateful. Our school is what it is. Where's your gratitude? Go home. I suspect this is typical and greatly fuels anger the attitude that the authorities are owed gratitude which, when not delivered, makes them particularly angry, because that view of things is actually how they view themselves giving the poor the direction they lack, the little they have, etc. Etc. Please note also my apologies, as this is getting very long and we aren't even halfway, I think. So I guess this is a revolution Z experiment, also in testing the waters for a longer session. In any case, can't stop now. Miguel continues returning to the origins of RPS.
Speaker 1:What role did the early boycotts play? The Wall Street march unleashed incredible energy and desire. It showed that a large sector of the population rejected the deadening past and wanted to contribute to an enlivening future. That was the tone Give me dignity, dammit. And that tone mattered, as did the more immediate demands. Of course, I was in college, living near Boston, studying economics, which was still back then. You can see that this is a refrain for me a thankless, socially sterile and elite-serving pursuit. Suddenly, student activism demanded an end to campus complicity in war. That campus development came from the Wall Street march that, in turn, had built on the earlier opposition to funding and providing weapons for Israeli-American genocidal war on Gaza. One of the Wall Street speeches called for all those present, and all their family and all their friends and all who they could reach out to, to stop buying products from producers of the automatic high-velocity weapons that were prevalent in public mass shootings. And this idea took off across society and sparked a remarkable broadening of activism by attracting new recruits.
Speaker 1:I think it wasn't just that it was needed. It was that people saw how their actions could help and felt it was winnable. But I didn't own a gun and I was never going to buy one. It would waste time pushing an open door for organizers to talk to me or to anyone I was in school with about boycotting those weapons. We weren't gun aficionados. People who wanted to work on the gun boycott had to talk instead to people who owned, or who might soon decide to own, a product from the gun manufacturers. Indeed, it was a wonderful benefit of the campaign that, to succeed, it had to explicitly reach out to audiences that many activists had until then fearfully, or perhaps arrogantly, but certainly ignorantly and counterproductively avoided. Some people had reached out to that audience years earlier, when Trump ran against Clinton and then against Biden and then again. But the boycott was different because the boycott organizers had to bring to gun owners precisely the message gun owners were most hostile to. Nonetheless, activists started learning how to do that and then learning about and from those they talked with, and in hindsight this was, I believe, a major turning point for the emergence of RPS. Miguel asks how, in what sense, was it such a turning point? Left activists have always sought gains for their own immediate supporters, but unlike many other projects and movements, pretty much from jump, rps allotted its most creative and its greatest energies to reaching out to those who very strongly disagreed with us. That started in the early boycotts and I guess even earlier in some work that battled Trumpist fascism At any rate.
Speaker 1:Campus boycott activism arose first at MIT, where a bunch of students, including myself, went to Wall Street and were inspired by the famous we Are the Future speech. We heard the call for a boycott of arms dealers and we started talking about how we might relate to it. It was an action idea and we wanted action. We could certainly organize for students to not buy from the producers of automatic weapons, but we felt doing so would be sort of silly. Mit students were not prospective customers of those producers. It would be like organizing fish not the fly. It was not needed, so it would not be useful. So the talking went on and a new idea surfaced. Why should we confine ourselves to manufacturers of the handheld weapons that enabled lone psychopaths to become mass murderers? Why not also take on the stupendously larger military producers who engendered death, destruction and misallocation of resources? After all their weapons let countries, including particularly our own, wage genocidal massacres.
Speaker 1:We quickly realized that such a boycott couldn't be by individual students, since individual students didn't buy or design tanks or missile systems in their homes, but it could be by MIT as an institution. We would have to create a campus movement to demand that MIT reject contracts with arms producers and war purveyors. We would have to organize students not just to boycott assault rifles, which they would do anyhow, but to resist the militarization of local and campus police and, even larger, to resist all campus complicity with war. I think the boycott approach was part and parcel of the thinking of the boycotts that sought to generate solidarity with Palestinians, and similarly, I think the anti-war boycott extended the recent resistance toward Israel's genocidal actions against Palestinians. It of course also stretched back to the earlier boycott around South African apartheid.
Speaker 1:In any event, we said that MIT should not seek profits for investors but instead pursue peace and justice for humanity. And since the time was right, when we reached out to students asking for agreement that complicity in war was wrong it was like selling ice cream in the tropics I interject Well, that is blather. Organizing is never that easy. And so, indeed, miguel asks come on, it can't have been that easy. There must have been obstacles. No, yes, okay, sure there were. I was too glib, overly liking my analogy.
Speaker 1:For example, we encountered a troubling response that for MIT to end war research overnight would be budgetary suicide. We decided to deliver our demand and organize support, but to do so in ways that would ensure that demand was implementable. So we also offered positive ideas for a financial transition to take the suicide aspect off the table. No more war research would be our primary demand, but we would also propose how to operate viably without war research. We revealed in considerable detail how campus spending could prioritize dealing with ongoing, existentially threatening global warming and other ecological and infrastructural issues. We highlighted how funds could come from revised government budgets and also from punitive taxes on corporate arms producers. We initiated campus-wide sustained discussion of all these matters. We went from dorm to dorm over and over and in time demanded a campus referendum. The demands weren't even really radical, they were common sense. So was our threat Meet our demands or we will shut this place down.
Speaker 1:Having emerged from reflexive opposition to Trump, but then from thoughtful, angry but also strategic support for Palestine, we knew not to let our anger crowd out the need for clear communication. We thought carefully about the consequences of our efforts for ourselves, for the student body as a whole, for others beyond campus and for society, and we tried to mold our demands and associated actions to ensure desirable lasting effects. For the administration we had immediate demands, but for ourselves and, more broadly, for whoever we encountered or impacted. We kept in mind the need to get desirable lasting effects. Miguel asked Okay, but what was that like? How did it impact your choices? I remember long personal sessions with friends to explore how to discuss demands with students and faculty who were, for whatever reasons, not yet on our side, and also what actions we could use not just to express our anger but to win reasoned, committed support, able to apply still more pressure to go further. Our approach was less quick, emotive and feisty than had. We rushed into high gear and never downshifted to evaluate what we were doing, but we believed a more careful approach had more chance of long-term success.
Speaker 1:The administration found it hard to oppose our calls for greater attention to global warming, for research on new energy sources and for various ecologically sensible campaigns. What were they going to say? Mit loves global warming. We love oil. We don't give a shit about the health of anything except bottom line corporate profits. They found it hard to refute our well-researched and carefully formulated rejection of weapons research and even our public events, talks and then actions. What was your own experience of it? The boycott was my first serious political activism and luckily the effort took off.
Speaker 1:I remember pretty early on watching an activist accost an administrator. How can you sensibly oppose our calls for greater attention to global warming? Do you want to fry us all? How can you reject focusing research on new energy sources and needed health campaigns? Do you want tsunamis, hurricanes, pestilence and disease? How can you sensibly refute our rejection of weapons research? Do you want relentless fear and murder? I almost felt sorry for the administrator, but the activist was sincere. She wanted the answers from that administrator. Really, how could you Even though she was mostly talking to students within range to hear is mostly talking to students within range to hear I interject? A lesson is hidden in the drama Don't get caught up in the reaction of one person you are directly addressing when you are talking with many others who can hear the exchange, especially if the person you are addressing rouses you to anger. But those listening should endure no anger. The episode continues with Andre.
Speaker 1:Once I got the courage and confidence to get involved, I organized rallies and I did a lot on social media and I also helped arrange face-to-face meetings for free-ranging, open-ended discussions and living units. I worked on teach-ins and helped organize campus marches and finally, when our support grew wide enough, I helped organize and then helped occupy offices and labs. Honestly, the work was relatively easy because I became active at an opportune moment. The earlier very widespread opposition to providing weapons for Israel's horrendous war on Palestine had set the stage. You say you got involved when you got the courage and confidence. Well, how did you get that? I don't really know.
Speaker 1:At first the courage to stand, to risk repression or even just public criticism was foreign to me. To watch it in action mystified me. The confidence to speak, to act and not feel like a phony fool doing so, I didn't have that. I don't know the mix that birthed it. I do know that without it nothing much happens. Were there other factors? Were there more factors in your choices?
Speaker 1:At the time, I we had also heard about the earlier efforts at MIT in the late 1960s and we looked into that. After all, the 60s was big and raucous, but they and they were just us, as we read earlier did not fully win and we wanted to do better. The 60s didn't change society into a fundamentally new shape or even prevent, decades later, trumpism from arising. I admit that I wondered if our ethics would also grow greatly at first, only to later dissipate A decade, two decades on, Much less a half century on what would remain. I interject to my age cohort. Yes, the 60s is over a half century ago. Back then, a half century earlier, was World War I. It is hard to fathom that part of my life is for people young now, like World War I was for me when I was their age, except I think they actually get the 60s far, far more than I had the slightest inkling of the teens Note, I guess, to pick up the pace of this.
Speaker 1:So this episode ends before sleep takes over. I'm going to try to interject less, but please let me know how it works or doesn't work for you, the length, the interjecting, the contents, whatever in a comment or in the Z Discord system. Without feedback I can't modify this experiment to be more constructive. The episode continues. So one of our priorities became trying to discern past problems that we could avoid so we could do better. This was another key mindset leading toward RPS. We knew good activism had to calmly find its own internal problems. We had to find the older problems and the more recent ones too, so we could do better.
Speaker 1:So okay, asked Miguel, how were your efforts different than earlier ones? There were unique and difficult periods for the boycott. But the campaign grew and soon there was a national boycott of manufacturers selling assault rifles to the public, but also a campus boycott that spread from MIT to Johns Hopkins, stanford and Michigan State as the first few military-connected schools to adopt the campaign, and that then spread far more widely. That was already quite different than anything earlier. We were damn angry and seriously intent, just like our 60s predecessors had been, but we were more careful. Our most energetic activists didn't run out ahead of everybody else, but instead constantly related to everyone else and brought as many people further along as possible. We also consciously reached out on campus, for example to athletes and fraternity members, and beyond campus, from MIT to other schools sharing lessons.
Speaker 1:I don't quite know how to express it. The immediate scale and militance and smarts of an action weren't our main criteria of judgment. Instead, it was the ability of an action to bring in new supporters, to strengthen our own resolve and to make our movement more mutually supportive with others. That mattered most to us, but I also don't want to give the wrong impression. Mattered most to us, but I also don't want to give the wrong impression. We wanted to win desperately, just like our 60s forebears, but we had a longer timeline and we better understood, I think, that to win we needed to reach way beyond immediate audiences, way beyond ourselves. If some of us running wild in the streets would do all that, great, but if it wouldn't, then later for wild in the streets.
Speaker 1:Sometimes a school had fewer Pentagon ties and dependencies, so the battle was somewhat easier, but the overall campaign just kept spreading and growing. It became a harbinger of things to come, when to support the boycott became a mark of student responsibility. That was the kind of thing we sought. We got it to the point where to be responsible, to be mature, to be learning began to require that you join the movement. To oppose the movement became retrograde. We didn't shame people for not joining. Rather, the movement uplifted people when they did join.
Speaker 1:This was another difference, I think. Yes, we were against militarism and its weapons, of course, but more so we were for peace and justice, including better lives for ourselves and everyone. Another aspect was student workers on campus and other workers coming aboard and, in some cases, leading the way. They, and we too, brought another dimension. Let's not just end the current war-producing, war-abetting policies. Let's end policymaking by only administrators and even corporate boards. Let's get some democracy and then some more. Let's get some democracy and then some more.
Speaker 1:It was particularly inspiring and foretelling when cross-campus solidarity led to citywide demonstrations and rallies and when movements on different campuses started sharing lessons and explicitly lending each other serious support. It was eye-opening when, after three years of efforts and this is after I was no longer even a student we held a rally culminating in a sit-in at MIT that had over 50,000 students and supporters from all over the Boston area. Nothing quite like that had been done decades earlier. That was fighting to win. It was fighting for more even than our immediate aims that when all those and more attended a rally and subsequently, a few weeks later at Harvard, we realized we were not going to be stopped. People weren't jumping ship, people were staying aboard. Our upward trajectory of growing, sustained support was too much to overcome. We had a long ways to go. Of course there would be ups and downs, but we realized we couldn't be thwarted unless we undermined ourselves, and we were steadfastly committed to carefully avoiding that. And you know, the spreading didn't happen by magic.
Speaker 1:Organizers went to visit less involved schools and help them to get it more involved. Visit less involved schools and help them to get more involved. Can you tell us about some of the unique and difficult moments? Sure, I remember like it was yesterday. One hard step we had to accomplish was to discover and reveal the war-related research. How could we do that? Students had tough class schedules and few resources. The contracts were secret. Each project was isolated from the rest and, even more, each was shielded from not only the public but students too. In that context, a few daring students snuck into a secret site, took pictures and stole revealing documents. Sometimes radical activism is very boring. Other times, like then, it can be quite exciting.
Speaker 1:But this particular choice wasn't just exciting. It proved beyond doubt that MIT wasn't solely engaged in respectable science that the military could not pervert. Rather, mit was a big corporation literally designing drones, robots, surveillance weapons and bomb and missile technology for oppressing domestic and foreign populations. Students elsewhere made aware of such efforts, quickly used similar tactics to often even more successfully uncover their own campus's projects. Once we had evidence, we called for open books and escalated our calls for war divestment.
Speaker 1:Do you know Walt Whitman's poem that references seeing the universe in a grain of sand? I heard something like that from a famous scientist who said that nature uses only the longest threads, so that each small piece reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. We started to realize that each radical campaign teaches a remarkable amount relevant to all radical campaigns. That was certainly true for opposing war weapons and militarism. I hope my story can convey some of that. Miguel replied I am sure it will.
Speaker 1:But do you remember how MIT tried to stop the movement? Sure, I remember the incredibly hypocritical lengths to which MIT's typically liberal campus officials stretched their minds to come up with rationales for conspiring and murderous policies. And much of the faculty too Knowledgeable, scientifically oriented, highly logical and in many cases even socially concerned adults swiftly swept aside evidence so they could trumpet self-serving rationales. They admired themselves in the mirror, oblivious to their murderous culpability. Watching that, we learned a lot about what really marks a civilized thinking, caring person.
Speaker 1:Rhetoric and a bunch of diplomas were insufficient. They were often even a powerful obstacle. Society has a kind of catch-22. You can access resources, accumulated lessons and so on, but you have to become oppression-ignoring, self-serving, system-saluting, crime-abetting cheerleaders for whatever society's masters unleash. That's harsh, and there were exceptions, of course, but all too often it was true. Access to well-stocked libraries and labs, not to mention elite country clubs, could be yours as long as you molded yourself into a system-elevating tool who wouldn't use the library or lab for anything subversive.
Speaker 1:Beyond even that, which was more than bad enough. A few right-wing officials happily celebrated what they were doing rather than feeling a need to rationalize it. And I can't deny, at the opposite extreme, a few caring officials and quite a few faculty, along with many, many students, did escape the bounds of their roles to ally with us, and more so as each day passed. Still before our movements were strong enough to protect dissenters, the not just caring but also courageously active few typically got ostracized and then sometimes expelled or fired for their wisdom. I remember that the staunch right-wingers' absence of hypocrisy made them in some ways easier to personally tolerate than the more prevalent liberals who deluded themselves in trying to delude us. I heard that black organizers during the anti-Jim Crow campaigns decades earlier in the US South said the same thing about talking personally with overtly racist police chiefs, as compared to talking personally with liberals, who would say one thing and then do precisely the opposite, at least with the right-wingers. What you got was what they said, albeit what they said was vile. I also remember being very impressed with the officials who sincerely resisted their higher-ups, which was initially barely a trickle but which eventually grew to at least feel like much more. Of course, we students faced opposition denigration, penalties and overt repression during the boycott campaigns and later, just as we had somewhat earlier, for being pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. But that went with the territory. A more interesting trend was administrators trying to use fear and our sense of responsibility to curb us. They would spread rumors about how right-wing students were getting ready to assault us and how the administrators sympathized with us but wanted to avoid that horror. So wouldn't we please discontinue our encampment or our occupation of some lab to avoid disastrous student-against-student violence? The warnings were cynical laws. Their threats to use police, however, were real, but the pattern was similar on campus after campus.
Speaker 1:What were some of the key lessons of the boycotts? Regarding organizing, I think perhaps most subtle, but also maybe most important, was that organizers being right wasn't enough. We had to also speak, write and act in ways that people could and would actually hear and consider. Activist communication was about information, of course, but it needed to also be about feelings, empathy and respect, logic and evidence, but also dignity mattered. Shouting the truth, that no one would register because of our robotic or dismissive attitude did no good.
Speaker 1:Another key lesson addressed repression. You couldn't ward it off by saying hey, that's not right, that's immoral, cut it out. Telling a hurricane to stop blowing was a fool's errand. The way to ward off repression was to organize in such a way that to repress you would actually strengthen you. The administration had to feel that if they used cops, much less National Guard, against us, sympathy for us would wind up helping us more than their batons hurt us. It is a trivially simple insight, I think, and almost universally applicable, but too often not accounted for and never very easy to act on. Another subtle and interesting lesson I think and I suspect this may be partly enriched by hindsight was about the mindsets of the students.
Speaker 1:We asked to join the effort. Discussions would often go on for hours, with students critical of, or at least not joining, the boycott effort. They would offer first one rationale for not joining the campaign and then another. The weapons aren't really offensive, they would say. Or they won't be used, or they are needed to preserve peace or, perhaps most strange, when used, they will provoke dissent and thereby limit their own impact.
Speaker 1:I remember my initial way to reply not for offense, preserve peace. Are you blind or just heartless. Sadly, when I first heard student rationales, I would get aggressive and communication would stop. Later I became more patient. We would get beyond rhetoric to try to overcome rationales with evidence about how weapons are actually used and about the piles of corpses they produce, plus appeals to common sense values, plus noting that fighting against weapons that were being used was a horrible step back from fighting against weapons even existing. And in doing all that, we got steadily closer to the heart of the matter with each student we talked with.
Speaker 1:And when we finally got down to the roots of their reactions, from campaign to campaign in one dorm and then in the next on one campus and then on the next, students who resisted boycott appeals would finally tell organizers okay, okay, you're right about the facts, you're right about the ethics, but I am still not joining. Being right in a lost cause will achieve nothing. I heard that sentiment, it seemed like, a million times and they did sincerely feel it Over and over. If you plumb the depths of non-participation, you ultimately got to, you're right, but you will fail. So it isn't worth my time. It was very enlightening to hear that being right wasn't enough to win people to the cause. We also had to have a good chance to succeed, and those who rejected our boycott thought we had no such chance. Miguel asked how did you deal with that? In reply, we would patiently explain how signing up enough sufficiently informed and committed support could win Eventually, folks who resisted our call would admit that campus administrations would give in if a large enough percentage of students and faculty were unrelentingly committed to boycotting.
Speaker 1:They saw that it would make no sense for campuses to try to preserve war research for budgetary reasons or even for patriotism reasons, when doing so would mean an end to their institutions due to rebellion by their students and faculty. But then there would surface the full scope of what for me was the most important and revealing reason for people's resistance to heeding our call. I am still not going to join you, they would finally say, because it is useless on a larger scale. It doesn't matter if you win here or not. Even if you convince enough people like me and we together, get rid of war research here, it will be done someplace else. Even if you have lots and lots of people in many places, it will still come back somewhere and eventually, everywhere, we have to pay along and get what little we can get.
Speaker 1:I will not be Don Coyote pushing for peace against intractable war just to feel moral. People are greedy, people are violent and evil. There is no stopping war, there is no stopping injustice and inequality. Winning matters. And you can't win, you are on a fool's errand. Gueva responded. Looking back, it seems so sad as if the young folks were jaded and beaten, old folks Morbidly old before their time, morbidly old while still in fucking college. Andre agreed yes, that kind of hopeless morbidity significantly fueled almost all the student resistance we encountered. Morbidity significantly fueled almost all the student resistance we encountered. It was stated explicitly only after overcoming other rationales, because students didn't like to admit such defeatism, but they definitely deeply felt it. And so, when all else had been rebutted, students would say human nature sucks, so we are all fucked. You should make the best of it while you can Play along. Your efforts to save, much less to change society, are futile, I must admit, guevara replied.
Speaker 1:I remember initially being radical to like myself, to be liked by my friends, but not to win. It wasn't that I overtly expected to lose, so much as I never seriously entertained winning and what was required to do it. Doubt about winning didn't only restrain conservatives or old people. Doubt was a hard nut to crack. That's exactly right. While we relatively easily addressed morals, the harder obstacle was cynicism. Sometimes college felt like a cynics playground or perhaps more accurately, like a factory producing cynics. College often seemed like an old folks home. Doubt was everywhere.
Speaker 1:It became clear that we had to develop vision and strategy sufficient to overcome the belief that nothing better was possible. I spent time looking back at the 60s and discovered our situation was nothing new. The hippie cultural movement decades earlier provided a receptive place to seek recruits because they were already outside the mainstream, and that was a major help back then. But it wasn't enough. Deep-rooted despair was an obstacle to outreach. Back then too, we had to do better.
Speaker 1:I began to believe that overcoming cynicism was the single greatest indicator of people in some situation becoming radical and of a movement steadily advancing. Of course, people's cynicism was often bolstered by how much they thought they had to lose, but cynicism was pivotal even for those who had nothing to lose. But, andre, where did such cynicism come from? A defeatist attitude was drummed in tenaciously during upbringing and then schooling, and thereafter by society's roles, which made social defeatism and individualist greed a rational, near-term response to society's inequalities and hierarchies. Being cynical about winning social justice pushed students to seek only personal success, especially for those who thought they were going to be really well off and have benefits that they didn't want to risk. But it also colonized people destined for low income, low status and debilitating circumstances. Cynicism is a sick society's oppressive glue.
Speaker 1:Dystopia replaces utopia. Finding fault and broadcasting and dramatizing depravity was culturally dominant. To be deemed mature, one had to evidence and exude hopelessness. I interject Don't you encounter that nearly all the time? Defeatism in command? Horror in culture, in media, on TV, in movies? Dystopia, no utopia, don't you? Dystopia, no utopia, don't you? Andre continues.
Speaker 1:From our campus experiences I soon realized that in communities and workplaces and wherever else, this defeatism was a critical factor in why people resisted fighting for change. People had a gut level belief, sometimes even unconscious, that nothing better was possible. People thought, or at least felt, or at least made themselves feel, that we have had social evil for so long and it is so ingrained that we can't overcome it. They felt it's so fucking obvious. How could activists not see it? Only fools try for change. Well, they instead thought social evil is literally part of our nature. Nothing non-evil can persist long because our natures will subvert it. Pessimists would spin whatever facts came their way to always indicate how difficult change could be. They explained everything in the most depression-inducing and hopelessness-creating ways. Once you became aware of what was occurring, you could see it everywhere. That's why the dissent implied that you were immature, thoughtless and naive. It was a giant gain when we made it that the dissent implied that you were cool, reasoned, caring, courageous and even wise. How did you do that?
Speaker 1:The mass upsurges to defeat Trumpism, necessary and positive as they were, didn't fundamentally combat this abiding cynicism about fundamental change remotely as much as needed. Anti-trump activism was too much about removing what was deemed a monumentally awful aberration in order to get back to, admittedly depressing business as usual for it to directly challenge the deeper cynicism. That said, depressing business as usual is the only possible kind of business, and that is what seemed true for 60s radicalism and for much else that came before RPS. There was often great, courageous and temporarily inspiring motion, moments of elation and moments of hope and fierce struggle, and such moments were a kind of a tear in the tide of hopelessness. But social glue to hold such energy, spirit and confidence together was largely absent. Over and over, moments of upsurge didn't persist. The rip that they tore in the tide of hopelessness was too partial to last. It repeatedly mended itself.
Speaker 1:For those most aroused, activism was typically due to belief in small gains against horrible, deviant horrors, but it was not belief in huge gains against the whole current social order. You would have your group team, whatever, but the idea of having mass action seemed foreign. You might even win something, but to seriously seek to win everything, not overnight but over the long haul, was considered delusional. Many activists came to understand that we had to go beyond warding off excessive reactionary evil. Many came to understand that we had to create hope about a new society, not only about ending one war, stopping global war or blocking a race toward rejuvenated racism. But it took time for this lesson to move from being an idea that some would offer to nearly death years to actually defining what people chose to do, though I deeply believe that that occurring was key to RPS emerging and growing. And how did it happen? What effectively combated cynicism and being able to convey compelling vision, but also activists honestly coming across as mature, caring, informed, thoughtful and hopeful, and thereby undoing the idea that to be any of that you had to have little or no hope.
Speaker 1:And Miguel asks were there other lessons, specifically from the militarism boycott? There was a more subtle one that was for me comparably important. We fought to get our universities to stop sporting military agendas. That was good. It looked forward rather than just rejecting, going backward. That too was good, but it had a problem. What would winning achieve? Would our victory mean the murderous research that our universities have been doing would no longer occur? No, it would not mean that, as some who resisted our appeals realized before we did.
Speaker 1:We too came to understand that the research would migrate to private firms, often even created by university personnel, as schools would spin off labs by making them into private corporate firms, maybe even still operating in the same buildings they once occupied but now jettisoned by the earlier sponsoring school. This would not only maintain war production but also retain the previously involved faculty. Only the names of buildings and legal definitions of firms would change, not to protect innocence but to hide persistent guilt. This trend was rightly scorned as a massive version of not in my backyard you can't put that crap, but okay, you can put it somewhere else. You can even keep it in the same damn building it is still now occupied, as long as you legally disown it, even while it keeps right on operating as in the past. Better optics same in humanity.
Speaker 1:The lesson that I and others took was that we shouldn't allow partial gains to deteriorate or be reversed by cosmetic realignments. Campus movements had to transcend campuses to take on private corporations as well. Today MIT, stanford and the University of Michigan, tomorrow not only the spinoffs, but also the NSA, raytheon and Boeing. Instead of all the experience we gained on campus merely moving the site of crimes and then we go home, we expanded our focus. I was out of school by this point and many of us began reaching out to workers at companies doing war research.
Speaker 1:But by that time, instead of trying to get the people and firms to stop cold and therefore go out of business and put the workers out of jobs, our proliferating and diversifying anti-war movement confronted all sorts of forms with demands for how they could do new, socially desirable work in place of war work, thereby retaining their employees, even as we simultaneously confronted the government with demands to reallot funds from military to social use. I remember in particular one of the demonstrations where the activists blocked the entrance to a weapons firm and conversed with workers there. It was a tense scene, with constant threats, including helicopters circling above. This firm was deemed part of the military, so in that sense we were attacking the army. At any rate, we said we want more firms like yours to work against global warming and for equity. We want Congress to reassign funds from building bombers, missiles and tanks to producing green transit, schools, clinics and solar plants.
Speaker 1:A worker replied yes, and after you put us all out of work, how do I feed my kids? Answer me that. We answered something like this After global warming floods the world, how do you lead your lives? Answer me that. But why should you use your job? Why shouldn't your workplace employ you in worthy production?
Speaker 1:You might think the rich opt for war production instead of social production for technical or military reasons, but that is a lie. The rich opt for war production to ward off enlarged social spending, because enlarged social spending reveals that the government ought to benefit the whole population. They block enlarged social spending because it would empower workers against threats of firing Hatred, for social spending that empowers working people biases the budget. Another worker then said you expect me to believe war spending trumps social spending, because building high-tech weapons avoids empowering workers. Exactly, you could have a more meaningful job, better conditions and more income too, and so could all workers, with much less war production. But while you would gain, owners would lose, and that's why they prefer building missiles and bombs to ending global warming and building hospitals and schools. It isn't that they love mayhem and murder. Perhaps, with few exceptions, they are not that perverse. It is that they fear empowered workers. They are that scared. The worker responded after a bit perhaps, but owners are in charge. And I said yes, for now. Yes, they are, but not forever. And that showed another lesson we learned.
Speaker 1:We started to ask why the hell would a society militantly pursue militarist production over humanist production? The answer had to be that for decision makers to ward off rejection of the military path was to ward off a threat. But we knew the threat wasn't some external enemy. That was nonsense. The threat had to be that to produce housing and schools and to otherwise redistribute wealth from the military and private arms producers to uses that would benefit the population was way worse than producing weapons that benefited no one other than those who directly profited off their production. We knew that the people deciding, albeit with some exceptions, were not literally sadistic. They didn't build a tank and not a school, because they literally wanted to rob, much less kill, students. And we knew that benefits of military production other than profits for directly involved corporations were slim and even non-existent. We even knew that a shift of focus of war-related firms to social production could preserve and indeed even enlarge their workforces and, in the short run, probably even their profits. The government could pay for a transit system instead of a missile system. Private firms could receive the government payments in either case.
Speaker 1:We ultimately realized as well that when the government acted on behalf of the population, it could have two effects which the government and elites felt they desperately needed to avoid. To avoid, first, enlarged social spending could reduce conditions of instability and poverty and in so doing could empower workers and ensure them against attacks from employers, thereby increasing their ability to win still greater gains. And second, social spending could establish what elites considered a terrible notion that the government ought to benefit the whole population. I remember how seeing these two points made the disgusting logic of capitalist social structure far more real to me. It wasn't just that the government liked war and wanted its tools, or even just felt that it had to have its tools. It was that to produce socially valuable output would empower its recipients and establish the idea that government should serve and benefit those in need, not those wedded to greed, miguel says.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you took any lessons that were more personal? There was a key lesson for me bearing on organizing and people's belief systems. I was in Texas on a trip and I spoke about the boycott of military work in a big meeting and there were lots of questions about private guns. I remember after the talk I got into it with a campus advocate of open carry who wanted students to be free to bring handguns to classes. We were arguing on a lawn and before long there were a bunch of people maybe 20 or 30, listening and tossing in comments along. There were a bunch of people maybe 20 or 30, listening and tossing in comments. What struck me after a while was how we were arguing right past each other.
Speaker 1:The gun advocate was taking for granted permanently abysmal societal conditions. He felt that at any moment, some demented soul could try to impose his will on you. Some maniac could pull out a gun of his own and start shooting people. Having this view, the gun advocate felt there was only one antidote he had to have his own gun for self-defense. For him, the issue of guns or no guns was like a miniature version of the old notion of mutually assured destruction, in which gargantuan stores of nuclear weaponry on both sides meant neither Russia nor the US could use what they had without being annihilated. Similarly, my gun-advocating adversary believed that if most or even all students were carrying handguns, no student could get away with being a bully or imposing his will. Even a crazy student hell-bent on murder wouldn't be able to do much before succumbing. Forget that this ignored that the abundant presence of guns unleashing crazy inclinations and escalating what would otherwise be moderate disputes into violence, not to mention creating a debilitating climate of fear into violence, not to mention creating a debilitating climate of fear. The gun advocate took all that as baseline. In his view that was in any event unavoidable. I listened and realized.
Speaker 1:Gun advocates believed society was headed to hell in a turbocharged handcart and that no significant renovation was possible. This wasn't academic. For them, it wasn't merely a possibility. They thought it couldn't be averted and reversed, it was inevitable. Solar Rose gun advocates, mutual assured destruction, logic.
Speaker 1:When I wore their shoes and saw what they saw, I could suddenly understand how they could feel the way they felt. For me, open. Carry would unleash hysterical fear and escalate moderate disputes into violent catastrophes. Draw or be drawn on. More arms meant more flashpoints of mayhem at home and abroad. Arms fed a military mindset that infected all policy. But for the gun advocate it was different. Guns offset guns, they would say to me you are so damn naive, so damn ignorant, so damn stupid. Escalations happen. They are what they are. Killing killers here and abroad, is the only solution. Innocent blood will scar your hands.
Speaker 1:Nra profiteers drove gun policy, of course, but I came to realize that many grassroots gun and war advocates just felt social corruption was irreversible. They felt violence was unavoidable. The only defense they saw was a gun of one's own. To make headway against that, we had to establish that society did not have to be a shooting gallery. This gave me a new view of many other difficult debates as well. We aren't going to win what seemed like even trivially simple and limited issues, such as that kids carrying guns in classes would be horrible for everyone, unless we first won a non-trivial, not at all simple issue that society did not have to keep devolving into a kill or be killed condition.
Speaker 1:The general lesson was that in horrible circumstances that people believe will only get worse. Things that are insane when considered in light of positive social aims can seem perfectly sensible and even necessary for self-defense. If you believe inevitable dynamics rule out social sanity, then why not opt for the most effective insane approach you can find? In many cases the fact that people took that path did not make them irrational or even proponents of evil. Their approach made a kind of sense given their incorrect but understandable assumptions.
Speaker 1:Learning this stood me in good stead for late, trying to communicate across gigantic chasms of difference. It is assumptions, not logic, and often not even values, that require attention. Miguel replied. It reminds me of advocates of coal and oil. To reach them, I had to address my readers thoughtfully, not just shout my feelings about societal suicide and call them fools. Yes, but at the same time some of the coal and oil executives likely told themselves their path was righteous or unavoidable, but knew there were alternatives to pursue. They lacked any remotely ethical excuse, unlike the confusion others endured. In fact, I doubt history has any group as monstrous risking as much mayhem for others just to personally frolic on their own private estates while the rest of us suffer the flooded ruins beyond.
Speaker 1:Of course we had to stop that. On that front. Rps's task was to prevent global ecological disaster while winning social gains that led to still more gains. And finally, there was another lesson that would recur over and over. I learned how much one's personal confidence matters to becoming active. Without confidence, it was almost impossible to go where others wouldn't. With confidence, it became natural. No wonder mainstream schooling robbed confidence. We had to rebuild it. I also learned how important it was to make sure activism wasn't personally so debilitating and alienating as to drive people away. Seeking a new world couldn't be always wonderful fun, but we had to make it as personally uplifting and fulfilling as we could. Miguel continued.
Speaker 1:Alexandra, as you became steadily more active, did you also encounter resistance based on cynicism? If so, how did you reply to it, and what impact did encountering this have on you and RPS? We all encountered it, including inside our own feelings. For example, back when Trump became president, nearly everyone I knew had moments of desperate depression and doubt. And while resistance to Trump grew quickly and while to help with that, we had to address various intermediate obstacles, once Trump was blocked, when we tried to go further, we almost always encountered skeptical defeatism about human potentials. It sometimes reared up in ourselves as well, my way of replying, and of overcoming my own backsliding as well, was indirect.
Speaker 1:I would ask people can you think of even one person who is not evil? Perhaps your grandmother, some personage, maybe yourself? I could get everyone to say, yes, I have someone in mind. Then I would say okay, place that person on the social side of the ledger. Now list as many folks as you want on the antisocial side Hitler, trump, the Clintons, the rest of your friends and family and yourself, or whoever comes to mind as evidencing your idea that people are just too evil and too antisocial to attain desirable social institutions.
Speaker 1:Now consider, I would say to them that if evil was inevitably wired into human nature, like having kidneys, eyes or a heart, everyone would be on the evil side of the ledger. That isn't the case, and so evil is not inevitable. On the other hand, we know evil is possible because antisocial folks certainly exist. We know evil can lie, manipulate and fearmonger its way into major office. So we know human nature allows people to become evil. To deny that would be ridiculous. It happens. Therefore, it's possible, but it is only possible. It allows people to justify evil, even to admire and prop up evil. That too is possible, but none of that is inevitable. Otherwise you, your grandmother or whoever you indicated was nice, would be evil, would celebrate evil and would even worship evil.
Speaker 1:So we have to ask if anti-sociality isn't wired in, why are so many people so seriously greedy and violent or at least callous toward others, not just in their worst Trumpian moments, but a whole lot of the time? For the answer, I would urge whoever I was addressing to look around at the institutional setting we all operate in, consider it all together and note how it produces and rewards the antisocial and even the evil traits and tendencies you were calling part of human nature. Clearly, our institutions reward and even require greed, they produce insecurity, they nurture violence and they punish the more social and caring inclinations we also find in people. Since the latter persist widely, it must be because better traits are in our natures, albeit able to be muted. Our better sides certainly have nowhere else to come from. Surely society's current institutions don't foster them. On the other hand, the antisocial aspects of our behaviors can be, and I would say they are mostly produced by circumstances that impose them.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that kind of exchange would end there. For example, I remember many times giving talks offering that viewpoint and then moving on. But other times discussions could go a lot longer. Maybe it was me and one other person, or maybe it was talking with a group in an open-ended discussion in a dorm bar or workplace, or perhaps it was a meeting with a group and going on as long as possible. Such longer discussions would consider how our antisocial roles mute our social inclinations and how they impose antisocial inclinations instead and this would be a very pertinent matter bearing on people's deepest beliefs. The reasoning was trivial, yet the discussions were hard. At first people would not hear the case. They would find my claims delusional. Yet this was not a logical difficulty. It was a difficulty people had accepting that they had taken false things for granted.
Speaker 1:Did you have other ways of addressing the cynicism? Sometimes I would borrow an approach I heard Noam Chomsky use at a talk he gave. Imagine you were looking out a window on a really hot summer day. He would say there is a kid with an ice cream cone. Along comes a big adult. The hulking figure takes the cone, swats the kid into the gutter and walks on Watching that from up in your window. Do you say to yourself about the guy walking off with the ice cream cone? There goes a fine specimen of humanity, an average, typical bloke. Do you think to yourself that guy's human nature is freely expressing itself Is give me that ice cream and get out of my way in our genes, like having a liver is in our genes. Do you think to yourself I wish I could be as true to my real self as the ice cream grabber is being true to his real self. Or do you think there goes a pathological, deviant asshole who has been warped by his history or was perhaps born seriously messed up? Okay, those weren't Chomsky's exact words, but it was his meaning.
Speaker 1:And I heard Chomsky had another way of dealing with doubt that spurred inactivity that I did not like quite so much. He would say look, I know that if we do nothing the result will be dismal or worse. On the other hand, if we work hard to win change, the result may be better. Surely we should try. Unsurprisingly, chomsky's logic was sound, was it ever not? But at least when I tried using that approach, it was most often ineffective.
Speaker 1:The problem seemed to me to be that people have difficult personal lives, they have alienated jobs, they suffer over time and worry about their family. To give time, energy and emotional focus to fighting for change incurs emotional, social and often also material costs. A person who hears that to not fight for change abets collective suicide but to fight for change may accomplish something good, would ask themselves yes, okay, but will my personally fighting for social change offset losses? It will cost for those I care about better than my choosing to directly benefit them? Will, for their answer to me has required informed hope and a broader sense of solidarity than most people have preserved against society's emphasis on individualism. Inspiration, it seemed to me, often needed more than an entreaty that we ought to hedge against disaster. I first reached these perceptions with my own parents and some close friends. I was on my activist path. They were quite progressive, quite liberal, but in no sense really trying to win fundamental change. And while the above approaches to inspiring involvement had some modest effect on some people who I talked with, any significant shit in their actual choices seemed to me to have to wait for them to gain a sense of efficacy and hope. So, yes, I agree with many others that the root factor causing many to resist seeking change was not only, but was certainly very often hopelessness.
Speaker 1:Events that would spontaneously generate hope, such as a sudden massive dissent that betokened more to come were kryptonite for cynicism. Wide dissent like that arose against Trump or against various wars, for example, momentarily struck at cynicism's foundations when resistance against the Israeli invasion got started. Why did it go so far? When did it slow? One possible answer is that it took off because people felt there was something they could impact. Their effort would matter. When it slowed, it was, at least in considerable part, because it didn't immediately work, and that wrongly considerable part because it didn't immediately work and that wrongly caused people to think it couldn't work. But you couldn't provide that kind of jolt as an individual, not by yourself, in a one-on-one discussion Operating one-to-one. You had to resort to thought experiments like those about a loving grandma or an ice cream-grabbing brute, and even socially sparked involvements needed something more if they were to persist through slow times Writ larger.
Speaker 1:The effect of encountering so much cynicism on me and on many others was to eventually make us see that, while we had to accurately criticize unjust relations and we had to show their roots and their catastrophic implications relations and we had to show their roots and their catastrophic implications doing that alone would rarely, if ever, generate sustained forward-looking activism and would sometimes even stifle it. So then what more did you need to provide? Beyond overcoming imposed ignorance and willful rationalizations, we had to address people's emotional resistance to becoming radically active. We had to overcome people's view that we cannot win a better world because the enemy is too powerful for us to beat or because our natures are so antisocial that any seeming victory will eventually slip into new oppression and deprivation Even further. We had to provide hope that each person could personally contribute to such an undertaking in a meaningful and worthwhile way. We had to make generating compelling vision and strategy a priority. We had to change the balance of our intellectual and organizing efforts. We tended to overwhelmingly emphasize what is wrong with current society and its oncoming dangers and say nearly nothing about what we really ultimately want. We needed to switch instead to mostly clarifying what a good society would look like and why it would be viable, worthy and stable, as well as how we might help win it. That was a big turnaround. I, for example, went from constantly saying war kills, poverty stars, diminishment, stifles, racism subjugates, bad is bad, and from constantly demonstrating how tenacious profit seeking, gender hierarchy, market competition, racial segregation and political exclusion are to showing what justice could mean in the shape of a new fulfillment and new institutions and to showing how people's choices could lead to justice by utilizing new ways of organizing and struggling. And I had to make that change. We all did, not only because it was required if we were to win, but because we really believed it and are truly believing. It was critical because otherwise no one would believe us. I think that is what RPS mainly gave me in its earliest days. Miguel continues in this chapter of the oral study that he stitched together.
Speaker 1:Senator King, you were a student of history by schooling, but an assembly worker and cook by early employment. You became a political candidate and ultimately a US senator. You were attracted to RPS and became a member and then a prominent activist, and thereafter you ran for office within the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. Later you became the first highly praised RPS national elected office holder and used your position and abilities to propel the RPS platform. I have to admit it feels strange to interview a sitting US Senator, but I am glad for the opportunity. I wonder can you remember what precipitated you to become a radical? Please call me Malcolm, and yes, I think I can.
Speaker 1:I was fascinated by history and that gave me great sympathy for those fighting against oppression and also considerable understanding of the institutions that create society's ills. But however much I liked delving into history, when I got out of school I couldn't get a history-related job. Instead, I worked as an assembler and also a short-order cook, each of which ran in my family. I'd like to say I took those jobs out of solidarity and to learn, but honestly, I was just up in the air about what to do and did what I got. Then, luckily and unexpectedly, as a result of having to do those jobs, I wasn't looking at working class conditions as subject matter like through a glass or through a book. As a student, I was living working-class conditions at my job. I like to think that even had I gotten a teaching job at some elite institution, my life path would have been like what it has been, but I know the odds of that are really slim. So I am thankful for what I horribly resented at the time that I had to enter working-class life and endure its injuries. Doing so gave me a life-defining gift my radicalization.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us which events, campaigns or moments in RPS history were most moving for you personally? Well, as you might expect, my becoming Senator of Massachusetts in 2036 changed me greatly and immensely affected my daily life. But personally, two other moments jump out in my memory. First was when Bernie Sanders died. I know he wasn't literally an RPS and his politics, at least publicly, never rose all the way to RPS fullness. But for me his life, and particularly his presidential campaigns, were pivotal in my own history and his handling of himself, his way of engaging, his sense of proportion about his own role and his compassion for poor and working people were all highly instructive and inspirational. At any rate, when he died I was seriously distressed. The slogan Don't Mourn Organize is fine for a dying revolutionary to intone as advice to others but honestly, for those who remain around among those who really cared, while it may be good advice, it falls far short of reality. So I mourned for Sanders and that was an important period for me. What mattered to me became more concrete and, I have to say, death became more real as well.
Speaker 1:Second, during the later campaign for military and prison conversion, I happened to give a speech at a US military base in Texas. After the event I sat around with some soldiers and we talked about their experience and motives and what the conversion campaign might mean for them. I was greatly impressed by their thoughtfulness, their concern for the country and their concerns for themselves and their families, albeit encountering, even at that late date, massive confusion about various underlying facts. The proximity of change for the soldiers' lives and the sober, calm and scope of the conversion campaign caused our exchangers to be heartfelt and sincere. When disruption knocks on your door, it gets your attention well beyond how abstractions typically register. It gets your attention well beyond how abstractions typically register. The discussions with the soldiers went on for many hours and covered incredible ground. The lessons I took about the need to hear people's actual reasons for their feelings and beliefs and not just reasons that were imputed to them from a distance, often by media oblivious to their experiences, and to relate to those real reasons in ways that could create solidarity rather than stir up fear and antipathy, made my later interactions with lots of different constituencies much wiser.
Speaker 1:Looking back, malcolm, and getting back on sequence, what do you think fed into the early boycotts and many other such projects and campaigns emerging when they did? I think the proximate cause was energy that spread outward from the march on Wall Street and still earlier, plus the stupendously evil Israeli assault on Palestinians that engaged a whole lot of activism. But I also know that earlier there was the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, me Too, and still more broadly, the Sanders campaign and its aftermath, plus the magnificent turnout of women and their supporters to kick off the sustained massive resistance to Trumpism and so much more that followed. We could, of course, go further back also to earlier outpourings of resistance, and not only in the US, where I was, but around the world, and of course the anti-Trump opposition itself persisted and grew. I experienced all that, and all that contributed to what I and others became At bottom.
Speaker 1:I guess I realized that, as Malcolm X put it, if you don't stand for what's right, you're likely to fall for what's wrong. I also came to realize that a single effort at change rarely wins much, but when carried through intelligently, each single effort provides lessons and sentiments that can help inform a next effort and then another. The result is never a continuous, uninterrupted piling on of desires, capacities and gains. It is instead that at best you win some, you lose some. The trick I began to really understand is to learn from the losses, so the gains accumulate and feed off each other.
Speaker 1:Many activities before RPS aroused worthy desires, many taught useful skills, many conveyed needed confidence and overcame time-worn biases. But not everyone involved at each stage experienced all such changes. Many would gain new inclinations for a time and then lose those inclinations due to the pressures of having to return to the daily humdrum of filling their current social roles in order to survive. Their lives, aroused for a time, would begin to regress when they then became silent about things that mattered. And yes, in time many could and did return. Others would retain some lessons, skills, feelings and hopes and would bring those gains to the next round of activity. That is what matters most a forward trajectory of change.
Speaker 1:If a movement hits a pretty high point but fails to keep growing, then as far as winning change, it is deficient. A movement has to be continually busy being born or it will be busy dying. It is always the right time to do what is right. This was true not only for earlier struggles that ultimately died, but also for the arms boycotts. There were campuses where 20 or 30 percent of the students and faculty were vigorously active. As much as 80 percent agreed with ending war research. But as the dust temporarily settled, sometimes with total divestment, sometimes partial, sometimes with oversight for project, sometimes with new projects elsewhere that took their place. Most of the students and faculty who had been even highly involved went back to their prior approaches of going to or teaching classes involved went back to their prior approaches of going to or teaching classes. They went along to get along and to watch. That I won't sugarcoat. It often felt like a plague of passivity settling in, but RPS took notice and began to understand that understandable but devastating tendency and that not cops, laws or bribes was our biggest enemy.
Speaker 1:We realized that, amidst all else we would undertake in any campaign, a major priority had to be ensuring that people's involvement persisted past the specific campaign's end. Andre, you were intimately involved in all. This Was your experience, similar to Malcolm's. I saw declines and I was saddened by it. I could even have been totally sidetracked by it, and there were low moments when I almost was, but instead I guess I ultimately saw the optimistic tide more intensely. I saw that some people in each campaign kept on keeping on, and I also saw that even the folks who went back to their prior ways had a residue of the boycott experience living on in their minds and I knew it could resurface not long later if those who kept active did good work. So what was your impression of the significant number who did not return to prior choices.
Speaker 1:We were changed and retained the changes. The changes meant we no longer fit our prior patterns. A few of us became social misfits. We were shattered and for a time unable to function well due to our outrage at all the injustice around us. The bitter feelings interfered with us engaging thoughtfully us. The bitter feelings interfered with us engaging thoughtfully. But others who stayed involved became designers of new slots for ourselves. We decided society had to fundamentally change and we resolved to help make it happen. We became part of the flow leading toward RPS, along with those who had learned from earlier campaigns against Trump's vile policies and whatnot else. Other gains occurred at that time and led toward RPS as well.
Speaker 1:Perhaps most importantly, at least as I saw it, activists began to realize that the right criterion for judging events, whether meetings, campaigns, boycotts, strikes, occupations or whatever, wasn't did our effort immediately win what was directly demanded? It wasn't. Did we achieve the disruption or even the change that we directly sought? The real criteria was did our effort increase consciousness, desire, organization and commitment in ourselves and in the larger circles of people? Our activities communicated with this new criterion for judging our efforts helped birth RPS. It was a big step toward movement-first thinking, replacing me-and-mine-first thinking, moving from thinking only our feelings and our small group matter to instead thinking mass action and outward effects matter, small group matter to instead thinking mass action and outward effects matter. It was part of moving from having long-run desire and form short-run anger instead of having short-run anger dictate long-run outcomes.
Speaker 1:What makes you think that transition occurred? Miguel asked A lot of things, not least my experiencing it myself. But here was one particularly stark indicator. Consider a major demonstration called to shut down some elite meeting. The anti-globalization demonstrations way, way earlier in Seattle were, at least from my studies, a good example. In earlier cases, like in that case in the initial organizing, the focus of activist commentary was on substantive issues. What was the meeting that activists aimed to disrupt all about? Why was it a heinous gathering? Why did we demonstrators oppose it? What did we demonstrators want beyond merely shutting it down want beyond merely shutting it down?
Speaker 1:After the new criteria gained sway, this type of focus persisted for such endeavors right through when they occurred and into the aftermath. But before the new criteria gained sway, pretty early on, and steadily more so as the events neared, organizers and left media would shift overwhelmingly from focusing on the issues of the movement and on the aims of the meeting and, on the larger scale, aims of opposing the meeting, to just technical details of blocking the meeting and especially how to deal with police. The tone became stop the meeting, we win. Fail to stop the meeting police win. This was remarkable because, of course, elites won as soon as that became the substance of discussion. For that to become the focus meant real, radical insights faded from view. It meant organizers and activists could be easily crushed, coerce us into tactical retreat and you win, we lose.
Speaker 1:In any case, with the change to new criteria, our priority became to develop an approach that was about how today's practices impact tomorrow, not about whether today's action accomplishes some specific short-term tactical aim right now. When RPS members later organized to stop some meeting or to win some campaign, our demands and actions mattered to us for the immediate benefit they could deliver to worthy recipients, but also for how they laid a basis for winning more games in the future. This insight caused me and many other activists to deeply realize that being a revolutionary wasn't mainly about supporting particular ideas or even having a transformative vision. It wasn't mainly about courage or even organizational ties. That all mattered greatly, of course, but even beyond all that, being a revolutionary was mainly about having a new attitude. Life had to reorient from being firstly about one's day-to-day concerns, one's job, or even an immediate short-term progressive agenda, to being about winning a changed society. I am revolutionary came to mean that the organizing principle guiding my life is to win a new society.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's the end of this incredibly long second excerpt of the book An Oral History of a Next American Revolution, made into a podcast episode. My jaw hurts. It was long. I hope you will use the Patreon commenting system, or particularly Znet's Discord forum system, to let me know your reactions. Is this long Way too long? Is the content worth episodes? Is the interjecting that I add helpful? The next excerpts interviewees Senator Malcolm King and Andre Goldman will discuss the 2016 election and how its lessons contributed to the politics of the then only imagined revolutionary participatory society project. But as well, I am going to try to have a second episode of the usual sort with a guest, evan Henshaw Plath, during that week to discuss social media as it is and what we can and should do about it. And finally, all that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revelation Z.