RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 314 Campus Activism, Me and You, Then and Now
Episode 314 of RevolutionZ convey's an interview done before a large audience at MIT addressing the 1960s and now. What follows is a somewhat edited version of what an AI offered as a summary.
From an unsuspecting student to a committed activist here are stories of how personal experiences and institutional dynamics paved the way for a lifetime of advocacy. From a fraternity with secrets as unsettling as bugging rooms and tapping phone calls to manipulate incoming Freshmen, to harboring fugitives and planning events and riots, plus anecdotes of intense meetings and strategic career offers, how do we deal with the moral and strategic dilemmas we face. Lessons learned from the strategic challenges faced by past and present leftist movements lead to discussing the left's "stickiness problem" and the need for the left to become more inclusive of working-class perspectives and leadership. Connecting the struggles of the 1960s with today's fight against fascism, this episode offers rich insights into the evolution of political engagement and the enduring need for viable, inclusive alternatives in our political landscape.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 314th consecutive episode and again it's a little different. I was recently invited to give a talk at MIT on campus organizing experiences and battling against Trumpism. This wasn't in reaction to recent writing or writing over the year or activities etc. But because a smidgen under 60 years ago, in 1965, I entered MIT as a freshman and I was very active in those times and thrown out three and a half years later, would I talk about those times? I was asked, the choices we made and differences now as compared to then, and lessons. I said I would, but then, thinking about what to say, I felt the invitation was just a little bit strange. If they asked me to talk about economic vision, for example, okay, but having not been on the campus in decades, having little direct awareness of their situations of life on the campus, of the culture, of the events they've been through, and on and on, what could I possibly say to students there now that would remotely resonate with them or even just in part address their current world, their lives, their feelings and their prospects as they are seeing and feeling each now? My assignment, so to speak, was to relay stories from a half century ago at MIT and particularly to talk about organizing at MIT in the 60s and its dynamics and character as we learned about it, and then to conclude the talk about organizing now against fascism. Conclude the talk about organizing now against fascism. This would be not a celebratory look at Mighty, mighty MIT, at least not a rosy look. When I was there I called the place Dachau on the Charles, not a concentration camp for its students, though even that was in some sense arguable but as an agent of violent repression and suppression for people in Indochina, feeling the smart bombs born at MIT.
Speaker 1:The format for the talk was cyber. I was in my room at my desk talking to a computer. The audience they were in a room in Cambridge at MIT seeing me on a movie theater-sized screen hearing me over the air. One student was asking me questions and that went for about, I think, an hour and a half. Then some from the audience asked as well.
Speaker 1:I honestly don't know how much use it was. I couldn't even engage with the audience. I couldn't see their reactions, to choose my words, to respond to their interests in light of their reactions. In those respects it was quite like doing episodes of this podcast, so much less than an in-person engagement, less than a conversation, but those are the breaks. I guess, however, reduced in human empathy and communicative nuance, distant rather than in-person communication is. So I figured I'd try to replicate at least some of it as an episode here on Revolution Z. For whoever is listening, and young, I guess it would be like what the MIT students experienced there in the hall listening, except they were sitting together in a big room, not each separate at their desks. For those who are older, I guess parts of this may remind you of distant times and even some of their lessons. If you want to see the actual talk, mit posted it on YouTube and I think it's also now up on Znet as well, and perhaps, if not, it will be there soon enough to see. Since it was two hours, maybe more. I'm not sure it will have more than this episode. In any case, or at least I think it will have more than this episode. I guess we'll have to see.
Speaker 1:In any case, the first question was were you political when you first came to MIT? I tried to answer and said something like this, I am sure when I arrived no, I wasn't political. I was hell-bent on becoming a physicist. I thought I was reasonably cool too. I wasn't a real jock the name for athletes back then but I could play ball. I certainly wasn't literary or worldly, honestly. I was closer to a literate and strikingly small town, new Rochelle being where I lived, a suburb of New York City. So no, I wasn't political, but that really understates it. I believed in the virtue of everything around me, implicitly and certainly not with any significant attention or thought. Society, including government, business, school, law, doctors it was all there and operating on behalf of people and I gave it, as best I can remember, not a thought, same for pretty much everyone I knew. I wanted to be a physicist. I went to MIT and not Princeton, say, because I had a girlfriend who was headed to Simmons in Boston and a best friend at Harvard. Next question so what is it about MIT that politicized you? I know you were political and radical and very militant. Very quickly. How did that happen? My answer went something like this, I think when I was a senior in high school.
Speaker 1:After I got out that summer, I met a person, a student from AEPI at MIT. Aepi was a fraternity. This guy was a junior. He came to town, we met. He lived nearby, we became friends. We spent a lot of time together over that summer. What was going on I didn't know, but what was really going on was that the fraternities rushed students. They sought incoming students and, for whatever reasons, they found my record, which they researched like they researched all other incoming students, to be attractive to them and they decided that they wanted to have me in the fraternity. And so this guy was basically that they wanted to have me in the fraternity, and so this guy was basically trying to explain MIT to me, explain the fraternity to me, become friends and create a situation in which I would join. He wasn't the only one, but he was the one I became friendly with. There was one or two others from other fraternities. Anyway, the process of the fraternity turned out to have a big effect on me.
Speaker 1:You go up, you go through rush week. What is that? It means you see various houses that they either invite you or you just go by to see them and you're basically auditioning to become a member of the house. And at AEPI I went in and I was wined and dined, and at some others too, but I spent most of the time at AEPI, and at the end I joined. And so then for the rest of my freshman year I was in AEPI. A few months later I think it was in February, but I'm not entirely sure there's a big meeting and they're inducting you into the fraternity, because you've now gone through Rush Week and you've gone through what do they call it? I forget what they call the sort of temporary initial period, pledge Week, I guess, something like that. I forget and now you're going to become a brother in the fraternity, and so there's this kind of ceremony and then each incoming freshman is sort of goes off with one or two upper class members who tell them things that they didn't know.
Speaker 1:So I was told, for example, that during rush week, the week when they're trying to attract and get you to join they tapped the phones in all the rooms, they put bugs in them so they could hear conversations. The idea was relatively simple. They wanted to know what we were thinking, we, the possible recruits. They wanted to know if there were things that we didn't like or that we felt were missing and that that was an impediment to our joining. So if I said there isn't enough interest in physics, the next morning, some hot shit physics student would take me aside and we would talk about it and I would get the impression, whether true or false, that there was plenty of physics. If I felt like you know, I'm really into tennis and they don't seem to be too into it I'd be playing tennis before 10 o'clock the next morning. So the idea was to give us what we wanted regardless.
Speaker 1:None of us rebelled against that. As far as I'm aware, nobody ever did, because this kind of thing happened at other fraternities also. None of the students said what are you talking about? You did what? If they had told me two weeks into the experience of my freshman year after having joined the house, that they tapped my calls to my parents or my calls to my girlfriend at Simmons or my friend at Harvard, or they bugged the rooms and they arranged my situation to try and induce me to join, I would have been furious, I would have gone totally berserk at what they had done and I think I would have left. But nobody did that. Because they told us about it, not right away, but after three months of rushing. The fraternity of the freshmen would have to clean it up every Friday night, you know, from 7 o'clock after dinner or 7.30 until 3 in the morning, because it was a ridiculous form of hazing. And then the weekend would be sort of shot, or at least Saturday would be shot, and you were giving up that cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1:You were, you know, you wanted to be part of what you had worked to be part of. On top of that, you were friends and the fraternities were very supportive. It was a living situation that was actually pretty communal. You know. You ate meals together and people helped each other. If anybody needed help with courses or with academics or even with personal stuff, brothers were friends and they were friends who helped.
Speaker 1:So by the time you were told all these stories, you were in and I was in and I stayed in through the what spring, the winter, the rest of the winter and spring, and then went home for the summer and over the summer I had some stupid job where I could think a lot. It was a peculiar situation. Anyway, I had a lot of time to think and I thought about what I had endured and what had been done and I decided to quit the fraternity and I went back, you know, at the end of the summer for my sophomore year and I sat on a car outside the fraternity. This is when rush week is happening, so this is when all that stuff I described people going in the front door being led through the house and out the back door because they weren't wanted and other people being wined and dined and bugged and tapped, and on and on. And I sat on a car and I told the freshmen who were going to go into AEPI to try and basically audition what was going on. And in just a matter of a few minutes there was a brawl in the street. The brawl wasn't with me, it was a bunch of the brothers wanting to get at me, to stop me and to beat the shit out of me, and another bunch of brothers realizing that if the first batch succeeded it would be a disaster for the house because of the publicity and what the administration would have to do and so on. And so the second batch was trying to stop the first batch from getting to me. And then the police came and, you know, I was taken away and that was my first political act, I think. I actually think that I count that as a political act, and one that was, you know, pretty edgy Just a few days later. So now I'm out of the fraternity Just a few days later.
Speaker 1:The story goes on for a while, but it really is instructive, I think. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell it. A few days later I get a call my father's in town and he's at this motel. When did I come over and see him? I said, of course, you know. So I went over to the motel and he's in a room that was rented by the fraternity and he's waiting there, and so too are some fraternity people.
Speaker 1:And then starts a parade. First there's some freshmen, my classmates, who come to the room and who urge me to stay in the fraternity because we're all friends and so on and I'm not convinced by that. And then some upperclassmen, and after a little while it's the recent graduates and the current senior office holders of AEPI. And these guys start being honest the sophomores weren't, even the juniors weren't. That is to say, they didn't really, they didn't really register what was going on. But these guys did, and they said to me and at this point they lost my father too he had wanted me to stay because he realized how you know how, uh, how congenial a place it could be. But these guys said of course you're right, michael, we know you're right. What we're doing is, uh, maybe illegal. It's certainly immoral by most grounds. It's rather vile and disgusting. Except for one thing it's for you. You're going to be the beneficiary of all this. It isn't just that you get into the house, it's that your whole experience at MIT is going to be different, and so it's done for you by us, and it will benefit you. My father was beginning to get quite disturbed at this point. I was totally nauseated and I continued to stay out.
Speaker 1:I learned some other things, though. They had planned out my freshman year, which remember I had already lived through Right away. At the beginning, they had decided what organizations I was going to be a part of at MIT and sort of prepared a path for me to become a known and a political person at MIT not political in our sense, you know, a public person at MIT, not political in our sense. You know, a public person at MIT to become what would be called the UAP, the Undergraduate Association President when I was a senior AEPI was a very strategic fraternity. They were serious and they meant business, and so, even just as a freshman, they had planned out this path for me. So I learned that Incredible. So I was outraged at having been lied to and I later realized that in fact that was my whole generation's experience and how remember.
Speaker 1:The question here was what about MIT politicized me? Well, one thing was the AEPI experience. The other thing was realizing before too long the extent we had been lied to about society, not by AEPI, but by schooling and teachers and the government and media and all the rest of it. And I and my generation, learning just how oppressive, just how unjust and just how hypocritical all that we had heard was, did get incredibly angry. I think I'm not sure how many would agree with me on this that that was underlying my generation's rebellion, both culturally and politically. A second thing that organized me or politicized me is the way the question was asked, I think was Noam. So Chomsky was at MIT and I met him and he was a very big factor in my experience and the experience of, well, just about everybody I knew.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I think I said in the talk or the interview was just, without going on overly long, I described the speed of it For me and for virtually everybody I knew. We became political very quickly. We went from Pollyanna the world's to angry, really angry, to dissenting, to becoming ideological, to becoming revolutionary, or what we called revolutionary in a matter of months. So the next question then came okay, what did you learn about MIT? The students attending wanted to hear things about MIT, and I didn't think it made any sense to tell them things that they obviously had already known and also sort of let into their consciousness.
Speaker 1:So I said, well, one of the things that surprised me was the teaching. I mean, here's this world-class university, this world-class institution, and I found the teaching pretty vapid. It seemed to me that more often than not, faculty and I didn't know whether this was true still, and I said so, but in those days, faculty, often in undergraduate courses and I even took some graduate courses even right at the outset and faculty would basically read the textbook to students or put it up on the board. You know, writing quickly the particular part of it that was the you know that week's or that day's material, and what they didn't do is they didn't get up in front of the room and say, okay, you read this shit, you read this stuff. If you have any questions, ask them.
Speaker 1:But what I'd like to do is talk to you about its application in the work that people like I do, in other words, what's their life like as a researcher or as an experimentalist or as a theorist? And I found very, very little of that, which struck me as very strange if they actually were trying to teach anything. I also told them that I learned something about liberals. A lot about liberals, because there were a lot of liberal faculty and a lot of liberal also, admit. Well, not a lot because there were only so many administrators, but a reasonable proportion of them were liberal.
Speaker 1:And in the course of our organizing and demonstrating and so on, you learned a lot about the extent to which they, and presumably other liberals, to be sure, could mold their perceptions to correspond to what they wanted to do and how their identity was aligned. And then I started thinking back to the AE Pye example and I said look, it's not that different. Good people my classmates were good people. I thought I was a good person. I thought I was a good person could get sucked into a rabbit hole of peculiar commitments let's call it that were contrary to their own values and to their own underlying aspirations. Very simply, and that is what had happened in the fraternity, and it happened for freshmen, and by the time people were seniors and successful at the kinds of things that you do the duplicity and all the rest of it. They were totally ready to operate within corporate and capitalist realms, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Another thing that had a big impact on me was I spent a few minutes not very long, maybe a half an hour interacting with a guy named James Killian. This happened after I was, you know, years in, and I was president of the thing and all the rest of it, and this guy reminded me of Hannibal Lecter, the guy in the movie, the guy that Trump seemed to like. He was I don't know how to describe it. You talk to him. It's not that he was dumb, he was very smart. It's not that he wasn't verbal and, you know, couldn't express himself. He could. You felt that behind his eyes there was simply nothing. There was intelligence but there was no morality. He was Hannibal Lecter and I had never encountered anything like that, and it helped me to understand how some of the people at the top were as they are. But in another interaction I debated with Hubert Humphrey. Killian was the ruling class. Killian was a owner, a corporate leader, a member of that particular set of people. Hubert Humphrey was vice president of the United States. He was a member of a kind of a different faction of the elite that runs the country and I debated with him.
Speaker 1:It was mostly about international relations and therefore Vietnam, but also imperialism writ larger and American foreign policy writ larger, and honestly, I destroyed them in front of a couple of thousand people in Kresge Auditorium, or at least that was my perception and it was the perception of pretty much everybody I talked to, including faculty. And so when the thing ended, and I'll tell you, at the beginning of it, I was so scared it was ridiculous. I was sitting in a chair and my hands were sort of making impressions in the arms of the chair because I was tense about would I mess this up or would I do a good job and have a good effect In any case, at the end of it would I do a good job and have a good effect In any case, at the end of it. I was talking to Noam and I asked him. I said, noam, I don't understand something. This guy is not very on the ball. I mean, he was like a marshmallow in the debate and he just didn't know his stuff. And he was. You know he wasn't very quick and he didn't. How is he the vice president of the United States? How does he function? And Noam said to me when you're an elephant and you're dealing with smaller creatures, let's say mice or fleas, you just have to know how to throw your weight around. You don't have to be much better than that to come out on top. That formulation was something to learn. I thought At another point and this was another big lesson. I mean, maybe for you all who are listening these aren't big lessons, but they were for me, so I relayed them.
Speaker 1:The Undergraduate Association president gave an incoming speech, a kind of welcoming speech to the new freshman class of that year. So this is when I was a senior giving this speech to the incoming freshman class, and first the president of the university gives a speech. His name was Howard Johnson and he gave a speech. And when he gets done, I hop up on the stage in this big auditorium and I give a speech. Okay, so I gave a speech that was incredibly militant. This might have been the first time I used the phrase Dachau, on the trials, and explained it. You know I was dripping anger and militance toward MIT, toward corporations, toward racism, toward sexism, everything, all of the features and characteristics that are, you know, part and parcel of now, of my current views, you know, not maybe as well developed then, but nonetheless're expressed. And so I get that. And obviously the freshmen, you know they hadn't seen anything like this and they were sort of warned, uh-oh, look what's going to happen. And that's exactly what it was. It was a sort of you know, with us or against us, because we're not going away and the school is going to be disrupted.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I get off the stage and I'm walking up the aisle to leave the auditorium and there's this guy standing there, very spiffy, looking, very well laid out, and he's a pretty young guy. He's probably in his 30s or early 40s, I didn't know. He's older than me, but he was pretty young. And he comes toward me and it's just like the movie the Graduate. I'm not making this stuff up, I'm not making any of this stuff up, it's all the way it was. He comes at me and he says in the Graduate I'm pretty sure the guy says plastics, but in this case, if I remember right, he says chemicals. And I say what are you talking about? You know, I'm in no mood. And he says chemicals. Michael, I would like you to come with me back to Germany to become a vice president at this big company he describes I'm looking at him like I'm dealing with a lunatic, but he's not. I mean, he's very, you know, it's evident that he knows exactly what he's doing.
Speaker 1:And so we talked for a couple of seconds I don't remember the rest and I moved on. And so we talked for a couple of seconds I don't remember the rest and I moved on. But why was that a lesson? Because this guy had just heard me, you know, smash capitalism, smash what he was offering me, literally before the fact, but still totally obviously. And yet he thought he could buy me off in two minutes. That's how confident these guys are that their money and their wealth and their power is so attractive that it will buy anybody off. This wasn't the only time I ran into a lesson like that, but I sort of remembered it At this point. I think I was going on so long that I figured okay, you know, let's move on. What's the next question?
Speaker 1:And the next question was how did you and others organize a movement at MIT? So I said well, a lot of it will be familiar familiar, I think, but some of it might not be so. Okay, you know, we did teach-ins about the war, which would sometimes branch out into addressing other things as well, but it's mostly about Vietnam, and we did leafleting, and then I explained what leafleting was. You know that we use the mimeograph machine and we'd stay up all night mimeographing leaflets and then we would put them under doors and hand them to people and so on, and they would have information about the war and maybe about MIT, depending upon when. And then I said, but mainly we did face-to-face directed organizing, and that I explained a little bit, because the organization that was formed at MIT was called Rosa Luxemburg, sds, and we actually were pretty strategic Don't want to over-exaggerate it, but we were pretty strategic.
Speaker 1:And so, confronting the issue of how do we build a larger movement that's able to win things at MIT, we said, okay, well, we have to reach the student body which meanwhile hated us. You have to understand that in 1965, 66, especially 65, by 66, we were already doing stuff. But when there was a demonstration on the Boston Common around the war, an early demonstration, small demonstrations some people from MIT would go, but they would go to throw rocks at the demonstrators. So when we were starting to organize at MIT, our point of view was not exactly popular. So what we did is we picked out people, actual specific students. The best player on the basketball team it was popular. The well-known student on campus, the head president of the interfraternity conference. We picked specific and that's who I was assigned. We picked specific people to go and initially organize so as to gain credibility and reach and be able to organize others.
Speaker 1:But ultimately we did lots and lots of face-to-face, conversational, directed organizing and then we also did direct actions and I said this might be a little different. Also, we did do the kinds of things and you know it was an antisocial kind of environment. That's why the fraternities were popular, because they were more social, although they didn't break totally out of it. Anyway, one of the kinds of direct actions that we did was we took couches and chairs and stuff out of people's offices and we put them in relevant places in the long corridors of MIT. By long I mean really long blocks, long. We put them in the corridors so people could sit and talk and we put up wall posters on the wall, large sheets of paper with a marker attached and we would put on the paper some kind of quote or some kind of provocative, you know aphorism or maybe a demand, and we would be inviting people to write their own thoughts and then to talk about them, and that actually worked rather well. And then we would also do the kind of mobilizing activity, ie a march ora riot. We did stuff like that too.
Speaker 1:The next question was what mistakes did you make? That, too, the next question was what mistakes did you make? This is where, from my point of view, it was starting to get important. I just didn't know the value of what went before. But here I thought maybe all right, there's something real here, because you have to avoid the mistakes we made.
Speaker 1:So the ones that I talked about, and again, all of these things I could have gone on much longer, of course, but the ones that I talked about were well. One was we were good about, I think, and effective about affecting people's consciousness. So we managed to convey what was going on in Indochina, and then a lot about corporations and about MIT and about the way the world works, to people's heads, to people's consciousness. But we weren't nearly as good, we weren't remotely as good about actually leaving an effect on institutions about actually winning changes which would then sustain the consciousnesses going into the future. So we accomplished a great deal and the 60s accomplished a great deal, but it didn't occur in a way that would persist and a lot of it didn't persist in a way that would persist and a lot of it didn't persist.
Speaker 1:Regarding tone and culture, we made, I think, serious mistakes in the sense that we had a tone about us, we had a culture about us. Partly, I think at this point I described I'm not sure, but in any case it's the case In those days the universe of people that was relevant for the discussion that we're having about the left and about dissent and resistance and so on, had two parts. One was the overtly political part, so that was SDS. That was the part where people were overtly anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, feminist, anti-racist and so on. And there was the other part, which was typically called the hippie part. It was the counter-cultural part. You know, these were people and some of us were in both parts. These were people who were fed up with society, who discovered all the lies and rebelled by trying to basically step outside the way of living. So it wasn't overtly political, but it was highly political in the sense that it rejected life as it was known and tried to create alternative culture, alternative ways of interacting and so on. And a mistake that we made, I suppose, is we political folks did a lot of our organizing among the counterculture folks. Why Because they were halfway to us already among the counterculture folks? Why Because they were halfway to us already, but it meant we didn't do that much organizing in other constituencies that we really did need to reach, and that was a mistake. Another mistake was why people didn't participate.
Speaker 1:I told a story of a couple of stories about this. One was that when we organized against the war, people would resist. They would often resist by denying that it was even happening, by saying that if it was happening it was on behalf of the Vietnamese and to fight the evil communists, and so on and so forth. And as we would slowly but surely peel away those lines of rationale for not opposing the massacres that were going on, we would come to an underlying reason, and the underlying reason was people are crap. The underlying reason was why are you doing this? Why are you even trying? It's impossible to get rid of war, to get rid of violence, to get rid of exploitation. That stuff exists because that's what people are and so there's no point.
Speaker 1:And we didn't deal with that well enough. I don't think we had ways of doing it and I explained some of them, but we missed the necessity for vision, I believe. And I think this is important, because another thing that people would say to us is look, I know what you're against. Anybody in their right mind on the MIT campus has to know what you're against. You're screaming it all over the place, it's everywhere. But what are you for? What do you want? Why should I join your movement when it is not obvious to me what you're seeking?
Speaker 1:And they meant that sincerely and we took it insincerely, I think, often. So we took it often, as you know what are you going to replace war with? What are you going to replace capitalism with? You don't have any answer to that. So get out of my face. And we took it as just that, a way to say get out of my face. I want to go back to class. That by posing to us that we weren't ready to answer that question, and we took it as just that, we didn't hear that there was a sincere and a justified aspect of it when people asked what do you want? A lot of them were really saying is there anything better? What do you want? What is all this time and effort and struggle going to yield? That's any better than what we have? And we didn't hear that, and I think that was another serious mistake. We often couched everything in negative terms, which only added to that problem.
Speaker 1:We had a slogan then we want the world and we want it now. It actually came from a Doors song, I believe, but in any case, we want the world and we want it now. It had a good and a bad aspect. The good aspect was we were confident and we were assertive and we were militant. We want it, damn it, assertive and we were militant, we want it, damn it. The bad aspect was we want it now led to a whole lot of stupidity in thinking that we were going to get it now, or at least not that far off, and therefore we didn't have to think seriously about a longer term process, and that was a gigantic mistake. And there's one more thing I want I mentioned I think I mentioned it anyway. I want to mention it now because it's coming to mind it was.
Speaker 1:I think it's a sort of a more strategic, more explicitly strategic error era. We went, like I had said earlier, very quickly to a very developed, so to speak especially compared to others at the time political stance and militance and commitment. And when you got that let's say on a campus, so let's say at MIT or at some other campus, columbia University in New York or wherever right You've sort of confronted a problem. And we confronted it very explicitly in RLSDS. We sort of said do we want to go berserk? Do we want to create disruption on a grand scale, big enough to be seen elsewhere in the country, in hopes of inspiring others to get active and do likewise? So in other words, our action would provoke, would organize, or the experience or the site of our activity would provoke and organize. And certainly that does happen. You know, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement earlier provoked and inspired and in some ways organized people around the country. So did the actions at Columbia and so did the actions in Cambridge. So we were explicitly thinking about that. Or do we want to build? Do we want to build in campuses throughout the Boston area, not just say two or three, but I think there's 40 of them, but more? Do we want to get into the community? Do we want to build a much larger, stronger base before we most aggressively challenge power and authority.
Speaker 1:And the action faction that's what it's called won, and so we planned campaigns that we knew were going to be very visible and disruptive, and so on. We organized riots and the other faction I can't remember the name of it, maybe I'll remember it as we go along but anyway, the other faction didn't win. But I think they were right. Ultimately, I think that that was a big mistake. Right, ultimately, I think that that was a big mistake and that it was part and parcel of a mindset. The mindset was when we act, for instance, when we try and shut something down, when we try and occupy something, when we try and hold a big rally, whatever it is, big rally, whatever it is we tended to judge it by the parameters of the event. Did we shut the thing down? Did we have a big march? Did we have a big rally? Did we occupy the building, whatever it was, and we didn't pay a lot of attention to okay, what was the implication of what we did? What effect did it have on people, the people doing it, the people who saw it, the people who experienced it? Did doing it grow our constituency, grow our movement or not, our constituency grow our movement or not? To the extent that you underplay that, the importance of that, and overplay the importance of you know the event itself, you get an emerging process, an emerging trajectory which doesn't sustain the development of a large, committed, visionary movement.
Speaker 1:The next question was what lessons you took from your time at MIT in the 60s that might help now. And the person who asked the question said I know you've written about Weatherman and factions and the rest of it. Were you guys all congenial with each other or were you fighting it out with each other? And this was the way the question was put, I think, if I remember right. And what lessons are there in it? And what other lessons were there that might be applicable to our work here at MIT now? And I started off by saying I think you know I have read in just the past week the research you've done on MIT and Israel and MIT and you know the war that's going on, the genocidal policies that are going on there, and I've also seen lists of all the organizations on campus and I've been sort of hugely impressed. It's very impressive what's going on. But I do think maybe there are some lessons from our time that will be useful. I don't know. I hope so.
Speaker 1:So, yes, there was, in a real sense, three components, I suppose, of the overall left, alongside the hippie movement which you could include or not, depending on your views, I guess, who you may know, some of you may not know a very, very militant, aggressive, anti-imperialist organization, not too large actually, but quite visible. And there was another component that was made up of various elements who were more Marxist-Leninist, trotskyist in focus, more sect-like, let's call it, but not small, at least not small in their impact. And then there was the part that I guess RLSDS you could say was part of. Then there was the part that I guess RLSDS you could say was part of that was more um open, less less, uh, rhetorical, less regimented, et cetera. Uh well, actually you're hearing this on revolution Z, more like revolution Z, more like Z net now. And we learned something about that stuff. And, uh, they wanted me to tell them more about weathermen, so I did. I'll do that in a second. I think what we learned?
Speaker 1:Well, when I left the fraternity after about three or four months, a number of other people left also, maybe it was six months, months, and one of them, for example, a friend. He was from the West Coast and he joined one of those sects instead of RLSDS, though he was at MIT and you know it was a person, the same as the people in, or, you know, he wasn't genetically different than than me. And then the people in RLSDS, or gnome Well, okay, we're all genetically different than gnome, but he wasn't genetically different. Um, he, he was, but he got sucked into a rabbit hole. You know, sort of. I don't know how to describe these sects and I don't really want to, although some of them still exist and still wreck havoc at times, and at other times they do good work.
Speaker 1:Weatherman, I will discuss a little. Weatherman was trying to recruit me and Robin Hanell, who was my very close friend, and we wrote together, we've written books together, etc. After he was at Harvard, I was at MIT he actually wasn't the friend I mentioned, that was a friend from high school that got me to go there, but Robin was a friend of his and that's how I met Robin. Anyway, they were trying to recruit us, so they asked us to come along on an action with them. And the action? We didn't know what it was, but we said, okay, these were people. We knew, people just like us who had wound up in Weatherman. So we knew them and we were trusting them and we went along.
Speaker 1:So first they took us on a subway car to get to it and while we were on the subway I don't know, I can't remember exactly how many of them there were, there were maybe 15 or 20 of them, something like that and Robin and I to watch and hopefully be recruited, sort of like the fraternity, eh, except we weren't wined and dined. And so one of the weathermen to do something while on the subway, stands up on a chair, yells to get everyone's attention and gives a speech. And the speech was country sucks, kick ass with vehemence and anger and he sits down. That's what I mean by, I think, being oblivious to the impact of what you're doing on those who encounter it, as compared to it seeming to reveal you to be a highly committed revolutionary. So we get to the event, and there's more of that, because the event was a mixer.
Speaker 1:A mixer was a dance in those days I don't know if this still exists where you don't have a partner, you don't come with a date, you don't come matched up, you come as a single and you mix, and it was a way for people to meet each other early in the years, each year. And the weatherman. So we get there and Robin and I are looking at each other like what the hell are we doing here? And you know, because how is this a political event? And then the weathermen showed us. They circulated around the room and broke up the couple's dancing. They would intervene and separate them and they were saying monogamy is bad. They were trying to teach people by breaking them up while they're dancing, that monogamy, you know, smash monogamy was the slogan.
Speaker 1:You can see what I mean by doing things that somehow you have come to think I'm not sure exactly how, evidence your true radicalism and yet don't take into account their effect. Let me give another example of that. The Boston chapter of Weatherman went to a beach in South Boston I can't remember if it was South Boston or it was. Oh, it doesn't matter what section of Boston it was. It was a working class area and they were on the beach. So they go on the beach a whole bunch of them, maybe 20 again and they plant a flag, an NLF flag, the Viet Cong flag, in the eyes of all the people on the beach. And you have to remember that, regardless of what the people thought of the war, a lot of those people have brothers or friends who are in the army and are in Vietnam, and you know they're getting ready to go, etc.
Speaker 1:And so what were the weathermen doing? Well, their thinking was this and I know this because I knew lots of them and they told me their thinking was in order to organize in working class communities and we want to organize and reach out to working people we have to prove we're as tough as they are. We have to prove that we're serious about what we're doing. We're not just wimpy college students from suburbia who don't know how to fight and so we're going to go in. We plant our flag in the ground. This is them talking to me, not me talking. They plant their flag in the ground, they form a big circle around it pugnaciously and they invite what comes. And what came was. They got their ass kicked. You know, they got beat up and that was the end of it, but the point is they're just divorced from reality.
Speaker 1:One night they come into the room where I was living off campus, an apartment, knock on the door. I answer the door, the weathermen march in. I know most of these people. They're acting as if they're, you know, like I don't know them at all, but they say can we stay here for a while? Yeah, it's a small little apartment. It was ridiculous. I said what are you talking about? And they said just, sir, you know, I can't remember the details, but they were it's as if they were running from repression, and in part they were because they had done, you know, stealing from stores, you know, like underwear and stuff in stores. And what they said to me is we are the Viet Cong. Well, they're lunatics, but they're not lunatics. These are committed, courageous, in some respects very knowledgeable and caring people down a rabbit hole. So I learned a lot about that and it's a lesson that I think probably is still applicable.
Speaker 1:We learned about what we in those days called the totality of oppression. That meant racism, sexism, corporate exploitation, authoritarianism. It was just a phrase that we had for the whole system that we were against and that actually you know. For those of you who've listened to more of these episodes, you know that I have a sort of approach that pays entwined attention to all those things. We learned the importance of vision and strategy that I mentioned earlier. That has relevance now, and it does have relevance now when you think about something an encampment, an occupation, building occupation, a march, a rally, anything is it as much on your mind the impact that it will have broadly as the feelings that it will bestow and whether or not it will be revolutionary?
Speaker 1:We learned how to win demands. We learned that it was not to. But it took a while to learn this that it was not to convince people of anything. In other words, we weren't educating the administration at MIT, much less say the US government or the head of General Motors. That wasn't the task. The task wasn't to convince them. The task was to coerce them, them. And so then we learned well, what does that? What can coerce authorities, elites to make changes, because they're the ones who, until there's a revolution, are in the position to institute the change, to make changes that you're demanding, and we realized that it was you had to grow costs that they didn't want to bear. Your movement had to threaten if they didn't give in. The threat had to be there for them to see that if they didn't give in, they would lose more than if they did give in, that they're giving in. They're not giving in would cause the movement to keep growing and to keep diversifying and to keep enriching in its focus, and they would wind up losing more. So if you're trying to win on a stoplight at a corner, or you're trying to win, you know, a higher minimum wage or on a campus, you're trying to win a demand to stop collaborating with Israel in genocide, whatever it might be, your movement has to be able to convince the authorities that they need to give in, and to do that, once again, you have to grow. No static movement that isn't growing is ever going to convince anybody of that. They just have to put up with the annoyance of the movement as it is. It's the trajectory that convinces.
Speaker 1:There was a slogan at the time dare to struggle, dare to win. It came out of China. This was also a kind of a learning experience that might be relevant. Now. I would say it, others would say it, and one day I sort of stopped and looked at it and thought what the hell I get? What dare to struggle means? Okay, you have to dare to step out of your usual behavior patterns, you have to dare to risk the possibility of losing some friends or of being repressed, and at the worst case, you know, depending where you are, you had to dare to struggle, given the repression possibilities maybe getting thrown out of school, whatever it might be, or getting killed. But the second half of the slogan was dare to win, and that came out of China and that I had never thought about. And when I thought about it I realized, hell, there is some wisdom lurking here, because I realized that in a very real sense, the prospect of winning was something that most people didn't think much about, and when they did think about it it was scary in some sense. We don't know what the fuck we would do if we won. And so dare to win has some, you know, having some responsibility for the direction of society. You have to sort of dare to do that also.
Speaker 1:Then there was the issue of by any means necessary, and at first we thought by any means necessary is do whatever you want and violence is justified violence whatever. And I learned, and we learned in time, that it's more subtle, or it should be more subtle. So because of the role I had and the position I had, I would often be in a dorm, say, talking to 50 or 100 students in the dining room of the dorm organizing and all over the campus that kind of thing. And I would often get asked questions that were about violence. You don't ask, you know, would you kill somebody? So it often took the form of would you burn down a library to end the war? And when I would get asked that question I would answer of course I would, and so would you, unless you're just not even human. Would you burn down a library in order to end a war, much less the Vietnam War, to prevent millions of casualties and lost lives and uprooting of people and destroying of infrastructure? Of course, but it's a stupid question, because burning down a library would not end the war. In fact it would not help to end the war. It would make it harder for serious people who are trying to build a movement that raises costs to do so to end the war.
Speaker 1:And therein lied the by any means necessary lesson. By any means necessary lesson. It's by any means. That's warranted, that's morally okay, that would work If a means is warranted. Violence is warranted in reaction to you know, what's going on in the Middle East. Violence is warranted in reaction to the suicide of the whole planet, global warming. Violence is warranted but not wise. It wouldn't contribute. Of course it's a discussion, but by any means necessary doesn't mean anything that's warranted you do. It means you do things that are warranted but also smart.
Speaker 1:Another lesson that we learned that had relevance was importance of movement culture. So not just, you know, the multi-paragraph exposition of what's wrong with the world, or even had we had it, the multi-paragraph exposition of what's wrong with the world, or even, had we had it, the multi-paragraph exposition of vision, but also how you engage, how you interact. And I felt this powerfully as compared to just rhetoric. I was on a panel at a green conference and you know so. There were four or five people, I don't remember, on the panel and talking in turn, and when I wasn't talking I'm not proud of it, but I wasn't listening and I was thinking about something, and the thing I was thinking about was it went this way how many people it was around 1990, had been in the vicinity of the left since 1965?. And by that I meant not just they had been, you know, staunch activists and strong activists and so on, but they had come into the vicinity of the left. They had been in the anti-war movement or related to it closely affected by it. They had radical teachers, they were in the various anti-war movements from 65 to 90. They were in the no-nukes movement, they related to it and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:And I thought to myself well, you know, 10 million is a really low estimate. And so then I asked myself where are they? Where are those 10 million people? The movement in 1990 didn't have 10 million people who had been in for quite a while. And then I thought wait a minute, if those 10 million people hadn't left, they would have been attracting other people. So we're not really saying where are the 10 million people, we're saying where are 30 million people or 40 million people.
Speaker 1:And I realized that something that I called the stickiness problem was a lot more important than most of what we talked about. Where the stickiness problem was we would get people, we would attract people, we would reach out and bring people into the vicinity of the left. And for some reason, instead of the left, which is supposed to be the good people, the moral people, the humane people, the caring people, instead of that set of people attracting them ever more strongly and having them become part and parcel and stay, it was more repulsive. People were attracted, but the left and people or people were repulsed in the first place. And it was attributes of the left that I felt contributed to that the culture of the left, the behavior of the left and so on. And one of the elements of that was something that you all have heard often on Revolution Z, but it was the class issue. So it wasn't just race and gender, it wasn't just the movement being not sufficiently good on race, not sufficiently good on gender, it was the movement being bad on class. And you know, I spent some time in the talk and I won't spend too much time here talking about what that was about. It wasn't about we didn't understand capitalists, we didn't understand owners and we were weak on that and didn't know how to talk about that. We did, we knew how to talk about that and we were strong on that. It was different.
Speaker 1:I taught in a prison for a while and the people who ran the prison didn't give a shit, so they didn't care what I did, so I could teach whatever I wanted. So I taught a very radical course on, you know, modern American society and the economy and so on, and during the course there were maybe 50 people, 50 prisoners in the course and it was a medium security prisoner. So this was, you know, these people were in a tough prison and when I discussed owners, capitalists, there was, you know, people knew it, people recognized it, people agreed with it, but there was no passion, there wasn't much involvement, there wasn't much participation. And then I discussed doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, managers, a set of people I call the coordinator class, and that isn't all of them, but that set of people, and I described it as people who have a monopoly on empowering positions in the economy and who use that monopoly to get way more income than other working people, who are disempowered, and way more status and stature and influence. And in this discussion the room went ballistic, the room went, the passions went really high. I mean, it was class consciousness, but not about owners. It was class consciousness about the coordinator class, and I'm just taking this all in.
Speaker 1:This was. You know, the scale of it and the intensity of it was surprising to me and what it revealed. Well, first of all, why was it true? The owners were just as bad, worse in their impact, their collective and national impact on working people, but working people don't encounter them, working people, in fact, probably most people listening to this episode never encounter an owner a capitalist Certainly not a big capitalist. Um, never encounter an owner a capitalist certainly not a big capitalist. Um, I only did because of that position I had at MIT and interacting with James Killian, for example, and um, yeah, as a result, you don't have the personal experience of their dismissiveness, their arrogance, their you know, their entitlement and so on. But working people do encounter doctors and lawyers and engineers and managers and so on and so forth forth, and do encounter their sense of being superior, their sense of rationalizing what they have as being a function of their superiority, their capability. And working people feel that and don't like it. And I talked some about.
Speaker 1:This is relevant in two very big ways, more lesser ways, but two very big ways at least. One is having a movement that appeals to and can welcome and can elevate, to influence working people. It's rather like gender and race. You can't have a racist movement that's going to welcome and elevate blacks in the United States. You can't have a sexist movement that's going to you know sufficiently attract and retain and elevate women. And same thing for class. So the one thing it's crucial for is addressing working class. I mean addressing movement culture and movement behavior and movement policies, such as to be receptive to and welcoming to and elevating of working people and not just coordinator class people or wannabes people trying to become part of the coordinator class. And the second way it's relevant is more globally or nationally, because I think I'm not going to go into this now that it was a big factor in the slow and steady development of MAGA, of working class support for right wing views and policies, which is really often working-class hostility to the system, alienation, cynicism, latching on to the possibility that something, this tough politician who goes up against everything in captivity, doing something right for them. Well, let's leave that aside for now.
Speaker 1:People asked how does now differ from the 60s? And I said you know your research on your organizations are better. They are, you know. I don't have much to go on, but my impression is you know more, way more than we knew in 1965. And probably your student body knows more than our student body knew you know in 1968. And so that's one difference and it makes it different what you have to do. We had to undo implicit beliefs about the world and society that were false, I think. Nowadays everybody knows everything is broken and crap. You have to make the case that there's something better and that you maybe can get to it. But another big difference was I mentioned it earlier the counterculture's presence and the ease we had of organizing inside the counterculture. And you don't have that, and it might be to the good in some ways. It's bad because it makes it harder to grow quickly, but it's good because it means you have to reach out to people who disagree with you.
Speaker 1:And then they asked how I view this moment, and I've done a lot of that on Revolution Z, so I'm not going to belabor it. But what I did say is that a lot of what I'm hearing now, with people thinking about Trump's victory and the current moment and so on, is who do we blame, who's at fault? And it seems that whoever is trying to determine what's to blame and who's at fault is looking in every direction except at themselves, and who's at fault is looking in every direction except at themselves, and I find that very frustrating. There are some Democrats who are, in fact, like Sanders. They'll see. They're saying look, it's our fault. So there are some of them who are doing that Most of them aren't but in the movement there's almost nobody who is taking responsibility for the rise of MAGA and Trump, but I don't understand that.
Speaker 1:I started in the movement in 1965. That's almost 60 years. So for almost 60 years I, and whoever among my cohorts at the time, stuck with it. We've been trying to organize a left for 60 years. There's been left organizing going on and involving new people during that whole time. And then half the working class supports Donald Trump. Trump beat Biden I mean Sanders lost in the primaries and thus was unable to run against Trump. He lost to Clinton and then to Biden, and those losses to a considerable extent it's depressing to sort of acknowledge, but they owed a lot to black votes on Super Tuesday in southern states. Well, how is that possible after all that organizing that we didn't get across sufficiently just how horrendous Trump was. So I think we have some culpability. I think we have a lot of culpability and it pays to recognize that, because it may mean that this kind of thing aspects of what we've just gone through, even over the last 10 years, and one is Trump.
Speaker 1:Which is what? Which is this character trying to take over the Republican Party while developing large-scale support in society so as to not just become president but now become president and transform the government, and he succeeded in taking over the Republican Party so that it is now a fascist party. I don't know what other word you use for it. It might be unstable, I think it is but nowhere in the sense of he had no real movement behind him or anything like that. He developed support and he took over the Republican Party and transformed it. The other thing is Sanders, because Sanders, like Trump, started with relatively little. Okay, he was a senator in one of the smallest states and he was a little bit known outside of the state, but not very much. And he developed support, incredible support, so much support that he was the most popular political figure in the country and he was trying I think it's fair to say, if you think about it to take over the Democratic Party. But he failed at that, and he failed for some of the reasons I mentioned. But both those things happened.
Speaker 1:And now Trump won an election by 1%, and he won it with a constituency of people who, at least in my perception, only part of which are all the way with Donald Trump. A lot of them were voting about their condition inflation, but not just inflation, feelings of being distant and removed from visibility. They were voting about the fact that MAGA and Trump gave them a sense of efficacy, a sense of being able to impact society. They were voting for lots of reasons and I think a lot of it is unstable. All right, he's got a base of support that's not going anywhere. It's going to keep on supporting Trump, I think, and it partly involves racism, partly involves sexism, significantly involves fear and alienation and cynicism and hope for this strong man to do something. But beyond that base, there are lots of people. Well, for example, I mean, aoc made visible that there were a lot of people in her district who voted for Trump for president and her for representative, and you have to think about that. There are a lot of people who describe themselves as supporting Trump, but they would have liked to vote for Sanders. This isn't surprising and it has a lot to do with the class issue and the rest of it that we talked about.
Speaker 1:And then I brought up one more thing in the talk, which is that I feel a sense of urgency. I don't know whether I'm right about this, but I feel like you know, Trump is made perfectly clear by what he says he's going to do and by what he's doing so far that he means to reconstruct the government to be compatible with one-man rule, to be compatible with a fascist setup of extreme repression, etc. Etc. And I think the way he will do that, well, he's either going to try and do it all at once, which I think will fail, or I certainly hope so or he's going to try and do it step by step, where, okay, he does some deporting, but he starts off by deporting, you know, prisoners, and then you know people who have been accused or already tried, etc. Or he starts off with cutting departments and trying to reconstruct that infrastructure of the government, but he starts with one that people are, you know, not Social Security and not the education department, but ones that people aren't real familiar with. And he starts there. And each time he succeeds in something, he celebrates it as a gigantic victory for the people. It's a gigantic victory for his people, for all people, and he says that the remaining pain or the new pain he institutes tariffs and there's new pain, and so on are all a function of his enemies. They're all a function of the fact that he hasn't yet dealt with his enemies, and then he starts doing that. So I feel that there's an urgency to stop this before it gets rolling, before it goes too far, and so I talk to them about the kinds of things that students might do.
Speaker 1:Just one last question that they asked. They said you know we get the need to reach out, but how do you do that and not compromise? And how do you communicate but not use our language? Because we had talked about obscure language as being off-putting and serving no purpose. And they said but how do we communicate and not use our language, but communicate what we mean? So I said I mean I won't go on long about this either, but I do think this is really important. You reach out, but you don't compromise. I told them about reforms and I said I think a lot of people think fighting for reform is compromising. And I explained you know it's not. Fighting for reform is fighting for something that will make people's lives better and that will provide, in the struggle, the opportunity to learn more. What's bad is reformism and it's not worse than nothing, but it's bad because it's fighting for the reform as an end in itself. So you fight for it and then you go home. So what needs to happen to not be compromising is to say what you really want is to say what you really believe, while fighting for attainable reforms, and doing so in a way that tries to raise consciousness of greater gains to be had and tries to develop structure and commitment to fighting on for those gains.
Speaker 1:And as far as language, I said, look left thinking isn't rocket science. It's not like microbiology or quantum mechanics. There's no need for all of the internally perhaps understood and externally misleading content. If you use words that don't convey what you really feel and mean to the people who you're trying to communicate with, you're not communicating, you're misleading, you're causing them to think that you want something you don't want or, alternatively, they don't have any idea what the hell you're saying and they just think that you're obnoxious and, you know, elitist. And so it's essential to communicate, but not use in-group language. And we talked about that for a while, all right. So all that, I don't know whether you know. I'm not sure you can listen to the version online. I was a little bit affected by the context here. Maybe this is as good or maybe not. Anyway, all that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.