Answers to Questions Pt. 1

(Like the hate mails I received last week, I want to start archiving the discussions I have with people trying to start more genuine dialogues. Visitors, feel free to join in.)

The questions:

I was curious of your opinion on a few things.

First off I have read a lot about the 60's. The whole counter culture is still a big interest to me. One of the groups I found quite intriguing was Jerry Rubin and the Yippys. I read the Manifesto, and I think Rubin went nuts after a while. He became really dark. Abby Hoffman really remained peaceful all through his hiding and the FBI setup and plea deal. Rubin didn't endure nearly that and started calling for a violent takeover of government. He began aligning himself with the Weather Underground. I was wondering what you think of Jerry Rubin and the yippy movement, and what he later became in the form of a business man.

I also wanted to ask why you think activism is not as prevalent in the US as it used to be. I think much of it has to do with the fact that as the income gap increases, it is harder for families to survive. This leads to frustration in peoples own lives and survival becomes a distraction or deterrent from protest. People are becoming less involved in politics and less informed which leads to a simple complacency. Is that a part of the design though? I am very politically active, as you can see, which is why it drives me crazy to see people so unconcerned about politics and what the country is doing. It almost seems that distraction is the tool used to avoid an uprising, and it is working.

As you can see, I am very politically active. I now work to get those that I think will make the changes desperately needed elected. I know that I will disagree with you on some things as I am a liberal leaning moderate. That said, I love learning knew things from those I may not entirely agree with. This is the same reason I listen to right wing talk radio. I look forward to engaging in some enlightened conversation with you.

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The Answers:

1) Jerry Rubin and the Yippies were a particular reaction to the growing spectacle of corporate media. They recognized that the spectacle (the illusions, the hypnotic factor, the commanding effect, the dominance of mainstream discourse) of mainstream media culture required that activists rethink their traditional methods of movement organizing and direct action. Pranks, irreverence, dropping-out, were seen as the acceptable attitudes needed to challenge the hegemonic structure. Unfortunately they underestimated A) the ability of corporate culture to appropriate and exploit these subversive tactics and B) the passivity of the burgeoning consumer culture. Rubin was equivalent to a sideshow barker, in another time he might have been P.T. Barnum and/or a businessman… oh, wait, in another time he did become that. That in itself doesn’t discount his ideas. Of course he was pissed off, the radical counter culture (including very peaceful people) found themselves being hunted and persecuted by the American government (FBI, COINTELPRO, etc). Are you familiar with Situationism in Europe that took a more serious and unbending position in the struggle with what they termed the “spectacle?”

2) The Weather Underground were at least partially motivated by the FBI’s infiltration, persecution, surveillance and execution of major groups/figures that were resisting the military-industrial-media-university complex in the 60s/70s. Remember The Weather Underground never killed anyone (other than two members killed in their own bomb mishap) in their long series of organizational bombings of buildings of institutions/businesses they viewed as complicit and/or active with the war-mongering for profits activities of the M-I-M-U complex. Ironically, when the major figures finally turned themselves in (like Ayers and Dohrn) and went to trial, they were exonerated because of the illegality of the government’s tactics against them. Imagine that, an illegal organization that bombed govt/bank buildings for over a decade, were exonerated because the law enforcement tactics were so seriously illegal/wrong. Most of the members were re-assimilated into mainstream society without giving up the same values they have always championed and to this day fight injustice. I can provide you with some writings/documentaries that could help expand your understandings of governance and resistance, national as well as global, during the 60s/70s.

3) I honestly believe that activism is at least as prevalent today, if not more so, than it was in the 60s. The problem is that the media has been allowed (encouraged) to consolidate to the point where 6 major corporations control 85+% of the world’s media. These corporations act in their own interest, in true hegemonic fashion, and they thus turn away from the actions of those that protest the systems that enable and protect their dominance (and of their allies). So, the questions we need to ask, keeping in mind the 10 million people worldwide who protested in the streets at the start of the current, ongoing Iraq War (despite two U.S. Presidents now having declared it over)-- why didn’t we get a detailed picture of these protests? If ten million trees fall in a forest and no one hears about it—did it happen? I can count off the top of my head in the U.S. ten major protest actions this year on ten different issues… I could probably double that if I did a day’s research (and double again when we turn to global protests…). Only one has been covered, some would say promoted, in the mainstream media—why is that? Are you familiar with Project Censored’s work… ?

4) Having said that, what about the rest of the people who are distracted or overworked? From childhood, we, in our society, are trained to shut up and be quiet. We are trained to unquestioningly acquiesce to authority. We are trained to think “America, the land I love, right or wrong” or if you have a problem with this country you should go somewhere else. We, like Sunday Christians, begin to believe as long as we prostrate ourselves before the symbols of our secular religion, then we are saved regardless if we act out our essential beliefs. We are trained to fragment/compartmentalize our lives (work has no connection to our homelife, America’s global actions are removed from American's everyday lives, our investments/purchases don’t need to reflect our supposed values—the documentary The Corporation portrays this ethical disconnect effectively)? Most people have no training in media literacy, how to find alternative/independent/community news sources, and/or even why they should question the official propaganda that flows through the mainstream media.

5) Beginning in the 70s two major assaults on the gains of previous generations began A) conservative corporate-funded think tanks and their government flunkys began a concerted attack on unions/labor and worked to roll back basic worker rights/securities in order to further enrich the wealthy B) American education was defunded almost across the board and a new emphasis was placed on purely factual knowledge absent of more abstract critical reasoning abilities (except in the schools of the wealthy who supported supplemental higher standards through higher property values and expected their kids to dominate). I encourage everyone to begin to educate themselves about the root causes of current economic, political and social conditions. Develop archives of valued sources/resources that you can easily share with others. Always seek to lend a helping hand to people.

6) The increasing income gap is a serious threat that will explode on the national, and global scene, as larger sections of previously entitled people lose their supposed privileges. Unfortunately because we don’t deal with this through our legitimate channels of communication and governance, it will be brutally bloody and devastating. Who knows what ugly monster will arise from the destruction (and by monster, I don’t refer to the people, but those with power that will attempt to use the chaos to their advantage). Our only hope is to begin to seriously and honestly confront the actions of our corporate dominated government/military/media and begin honest and direct discussion of these issues in the public, in the media, and amongst ourselves (do I even dare to dream it could be done in education?).

Thanks for asking,

David Graeber: The Shock of Victory

THE SHOCK OF VICTORY
by David Graeber
Indymedia UK

The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.

This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.

I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here:

1) Odd though it may seem, the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average Americans really get wind of what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees. It know it seems implausible but it’s hard to come up with any other explanation for the way they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of mass mobilization, and especially mass direct action, and usually try to distract attention by starting some kind of war.

2) In a way this panic is justified. Mass direct action—especially when organized on democratic lines—is incredibly effective. Over the last thirty years in America, there have been only two instances of mass action of this sort: the anti-nuclear movement in the late ‘70s, and the so called “anti-globalization” movement from roughly 1999-2001. In each case, the movement’s main political goals were reached far more quickly than almost anyone involved imagined possible.

3) The real problem such movements face is that they always get taken by surprise by the speed of their initial success. We are never prepared for victory. It throws us into confusion. We start fighting each other. The ratcheting of repression and appeals to nationalism that inevitably accompanies some new round of war mobilization then plays into the hands of authoritarians on every side of the political spectrum. As a result, by the time the full impact of our initial victory becomes clear, we’re usually too busy feeling like failures to even notice it.

Let me take the two most prominent examples case by case:
I: THE ANTI-NUCLEAR MOVEMENT

The anti-nuclear movement of the late ‘70s marked the first appearance in North America of what we now consider standard anarchist tactics and forms of organization: mass actions, affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus process, jail solidarity, the very principle of decentralized direct democracy. It was all somewhat primitive, compared to now, and there were significant differences—notably a much stricter, Gandhian-style conceptions of non-violence—but all the elements were there and it was the first time they had come together as a package. For two years, the movement grew with amazing speed and showed every sign of becoming a nation-wide phenomenon. Then almost as quickly, it distintegrated.

It all began when, in 1974, some veteran peaceniks turned organic farmers in New England successfully blocked construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague, Massachusetts. In 1976, they joined with other New England activists, inspired by the success of a year-long plant occupation in Germany, to create the Clamshell Alliance. Clamshell’s immediate goal was to stop construction of a proposed nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. While the alliance never ended up managing an occupation so much as a series of dramatic mass-arrests, combined with jail solidarity, their actions—involving, at peak, tens of thousands of people organized on directly democratic lines—succeeded in throwing the very idea of nuclear power into question in a way it had never been before. Similar coalitions began springing up across the country: the Palmetto alliance in South Carolina, Oystershell in Maryland, Sunflower in Kansas, and most famous of all, the Abalone Alliance in California, reacting originally to a completely insane plan to build a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, almost directly on top of a major geographic fault line.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough: Changing the Story -- Story-Based Strategies for Direct Action Design

Changing the Story: Story-Based Strategies for Direct Action Design
By Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough, smartMeme Strategy and Training Project
In the Middle of the Whirlwind

Direct Action as Storytelling

Direct action is an age-old, common sense method of communal problem solving. Direct action is (quite simply) people organizing ourselves to make the changes we want to see in the world – whether it’s a community putting up their own radio transmitter to give voice to local residents, or mass civil disobedience to shut down a corporate war profiteer. Direct action is a good catch all term for any action where people step out of their scripted roles (be it as consumers, “good citizens” or apathetic spectators) and challenge the dominant expectation of obedience. When a direct action intervention is effective, it shifts power relationships in the moment it is happening, as well as builds lasting movement by leaving an imprint in our imaginations of new possibilities.

Every direct action is indeed part of the larger story that people powered movements are collectively (re)telling ourselves – and those whom we are inviting to join us — about the ability of ordinary people to organize, to govern ourselves, and to create change. Mass actions that are mobilizing large numbers of people to engage in direct action are an attempt to build a collaborative power for change that is compelling enough to confront and transform the coercive power of oppressive systems. Effective mass actions can build movement through alliances and organization, as well as reframe possibilities by effectively employing story-based strategies that can shift the assumptions underpinning our political status quo.

Narrative Power Analysis

A narrative analysis of power is the simple (but radical) recognition that humans understand the world (and our role in it) through stories, and thus all power relations have a narrative dimension. Stories are embedded with power– the power to explain and justify the status quo as well as the power to make change imaginable and necessary. Which stories define the cultural norms? Which stories are used to make meaning and shape our world? Who is portrayed as the main character, and whose story is ignored or erased? These questions are the narrative components of the physical relationships of power and privilege, the unequal access to resources, and denials of self-determination that define much of the global system.

Although the coercive aspects of physical, brute-force power are often more familiar and visible (police brutality, military occupation, economic intimidation etc.) narrative power can be equally coercive. The mythologies of Plymouth Rock, Manifest Destiny, Ellis Island and the American Dream are the pop-cultural histories that still haunt much of the political discourse today. Powerful interests routinely use propaganda, information warfare and the alluring buzz of the global advertising and marketing complex to de-mobilize social movements. When we are working to change the dominant stories about race, immigration, war and protecting the planet, these narratives are already in people’s heads acting as filters to our social change messages and often times limiting people’s sense of what is possible.

Telling a good story can provide new information, but more importantly it can also be help change attitudes and assumptions by reframing an issue or engaging people’s values to mobilize them to take action. Movements and campaigns that are pushing for sweeping changes in current policies must first and foremost win in the realm of ideas by changing the story that the public has around an issue. This means critically applying a narrative power analysis to identify the underlying assumptions that need to shift, and then telling a story that can challenge and change those assumptions.

Direct Action at the Point of Assumption

Across the planet people from all walks of life are taking action to intervene in the systems of domination and control. These interventions come at many places – from the point of destruction where resource extraction is devastating intact ecosystems, indigenous lands and local communities, to the point of production where workers are organizing in the sweatshops and factories of the world. Solidarity actions spring up at the point of consumption where the products that are made from unjust processes are sold, and inevitably communities of all types take direct actions at the point of decision to confront the decision makers who have the power to make the changes they need.

All of these physical points of intervention (and many more) are essential. However, our direct actions must do more than just temporarily disrupt business as usual because business as usual is a lot more than any one corporate meeting, event or specific destructive policy. Business as usual is a product of an elite world-view that defines the norms and priorities of the system and the parameters of the possible. Beyond the economic and political connections of the global system, business as usual is a dominant story told by the power holders that justifies their actions. A story-based strategy ensures that as we are intervening at a physical point of intervention (say the carefully stage managed spectacle of a modern political parties’ national convention) that we must be intervening in the power holder’s story as well.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Andrew Cornell: Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society -- Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s

Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s
By Andrew Cornell
Institute for Anarchist Studies

The international anarchist movement was reborn on new footings in the wake of the global insurrections of 1968, nearly all of which were decidedly libertarian in character. In the United States, the decade that followed was a time of experimentation and consolidation, as a surprising variety of groups sought to develop and adapt different aspects of the anarchist tradition to contemporary conditions. Sam Dolgoff and others worked to revitalize the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), alongside new syndicalist formations like the Chicago-based Resurgence group and Boston’s Root & Branch; Bookchin’s Anarchos collective deepened the theoretical links between ecological and anarchist thought; the Fifth Estate drew heavily on French ultra-leftist thinking and began pursuing a critique of technology by decade’s end. Meanwhile, the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation connected individuals and circles across the country through a mimeographed monthly discussion bulletin. Just as influential to the anarchist milieu that has taken shape in the decades which have followed, however, were the efforts of the Movement for a New Society, a national network of feminist radical pacifist collectives that existed from 1971 to 1988.

Though rarely remembered by name today, many of the new ways of doing radical politics that the Movement for a New Society (MNS) promoted have become central to contemporary anti-authoritarian social movements. MNS popularized consensus decision-making, introduced the spokescouncil method of organization to activists in the United States, and was a leading advocate of a variety of practices—communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, creating co-operatively owned businesses—that are now often subsumed under the rubric of “prefigurative politics.” MNS was significantly shaped by aspects of anarchist thought and practice developed both in the United States and abroad. Participants synthesized these elements with an array of other influences to develop an experimental revolutionary practice that attempted to combine multi-issue political analysis, organizing campaigns, and direct action with the creation of alternative institutions, community building, and personal transformation. Although MNS never claimed more than 300 members, it bore an influence on 1970s radicalism disproportionate to its size, owing both to the strategy and skills trainings the group specialized in and to ways in which MNS vision overlapped with significant developments in the broader feminist and environmental movements.

As anti-authoritarian activists have widely adopted practices and perspectives that MNS promoted, some of these practices—such as the use of consensus process, and a focus on establishing new ways of living—have become so hegemonic within movement culture that they are frequently taken as transhistorical tenets of anarchist politics, or of radicalism more generally. A lack of critical historical evaluation has, unfortunately, lead many groups to adopt basic elements MNS tried out, without also taking up the important lessons participants derived from the shortcomings of their political experiments. A brief exploration of the history of MNS, then, may offer insights into dilemmas faced by our contemporary movements.

Radical Pacifism and Anarchism
The Movement for a New Society grew out of a Quaker anti-war organization in 1971, but it built on traditions that radical pacifists had developed throughout the twentieth century. After World War I, a new form of pacifist movement developed in the United States that was socialist and based on secular, rather than religious, rationales for opposing violence. While a commitment to ending all forms of war remained the movement’s primary focus, participants recognized that this required them to oppose the underlying causes of war, namely capitalism and the imperialism it spurred. Pacifists distinguished their methods from those of the major left parties by insisting on a correlation between means and end, and by encouraging adherents to live in a fashion as similar as possible to the ways they would in the ideal society for which they were striving.

By the onset of World War II, this radical pacifist movement had incorporated a variety of important anarchist influences. Gandhian philosophy, which became the movement’s primary inspiration, was, of course, heavily influenced by Thoreau’s individualism and Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism. However, Dutch anarchist-pacifist Bart de Ligt’s 1936 treatise The Conquest of Violence (with its none too subtle allusion to Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread) was also of signal importance. These thinkers deepened the pacifist critique of war to question forms of institutional social violence, and highlighted the contradiction between the state’s “monopoly on legitimate violence” and pacifist tenets. Domestically, radical pacifist circles overlapped considerably with those of a small cohort of anarchists in the 1940s, including figures such as Ammon Hennacy, Paul Goodman and Audrey Goodfriend. Many young anarchists of this period departed from previous generations both by embracing pacifism and by devoting more energy to promoting avant-garde culture, preparing the ground for the Beat Generation in the process. The editors of the anarchist journal Retort, for instance, produced a volume of writings by WWII draft resistors imprisoned at Danbury, Connecticut, while regularly publishing the poetry and prose of writers such as Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer. From the 1940s to the 1960s, then, the radical pacifist movement in the United States harbored both social democrats and anarchists, at a time when the anarchist movement itself seemed on its last legs. A pacifist wing has existed alongside other anarchist tendencies in the United States ever since. The concerns and the approach adopted by the Movement for a New Society derive in large measure from the different itineraries taken by members of this earlier radical milieu during the 1960s.

Radical pacifists created the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 and were important conduits of participatory deliberative styles and the tactics of Gandhian non-violence to leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Meanwhile, the Beat culture, incubated by anarchists in the 1940s, fed into the more explicitly political counter-culture of the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drew on SNCC’s participatory structure and the ethos of the counter-culture to formulate two of the defining demands of the New Left: the implementation of participatory democracy and the overcoming of alienating culture. Yet, in the later 1960s, both the Black Freedom movement and the student movement, smarting from repression on the one hand, and elated by radical victories at home and abroad on the other, moved away from this emergent, anarchistic, political space distinguished from both liberalism and Marxism. Many civil rights organizers took up nationalist politics in hierarchical organizations, while some of the most committed members of SDS returned to variants of Marxist-Leninism and democratic socialism. If participatory democracy and cultural transformation could, together, be seen as a ball about to be dropped, the Movement for a New Society was one of the most important groups diving for it, working hard to keep it in play. The emergent women’s liberation movement likewise placed a premium on developing egalitarian internal relationships and making changes in daily life; not surprisingly, then, feminism left an enduring impact on MNS.

MNS emerged in 1971 as the new face of A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), a Philadelphia-based direct action group which had carried out creative “witnesses” against the devastation of the Vietnam War, hoping to “undermine the legitimacy of the [U.S.] government.” Perhaps most famously, members piloted a 50-foot ship, The Phoenix, on three trips to North and South Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 with cargos of donated medical supplies. By 1969, however, AQAG leaders began to recognize that the movement should aim not only to end the war in Vietnam, but to fundamentally reshape all aspects of life in the United States. AQAG presented a proposal to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in March of 1971, arguing that the times, and Quaker principles, called for a broad program to combat ecological devastation, militarism, “corporate capitalism,” racism and sexism. The statement succinctly laid out a new vision for creating “fundamental social change”:

“We hope to catalyze a movement for a new society, which will feature a vision of the new society, and how to get there; a critical analysis of the American political-economic system; a focus on expanding the consciousness and organizing the commitment of the middle class toward fundamental change through nonviolent struggle, often in concert with other change movements; the organization and development of nonviolent revolutionary groups and life centers as bases for sustained struggle on the local as well as national and international levels; training for non-violent struggle; and a program rooted in changed lives and changed values.”

Although some members expressed considerable sympathy for the proposal, the AFSC declined to adopt the program. Undeterred, the coterie of approximately two dozen activists renamed themselves Movement for a New Society to reflect the broader aims and the secular status of the new organization. Beginning with small collectives in Philadelphia and Eugene, Oregon, they set to work building membership and developing their program.

To Read the Rest of the History

Revolution By the Book: Learning from the Movement for a New Society -- An Interview with George Lakey

Learning from the Movement for a New Society: An Interview with George Lakey
Revolution by the Book

In 1971 a group of Philadelphia-based activists formed the Movement for a New Society, a network of collectives dedicated to radical pacifist, feminist, and libertarian socialist politics. Over the next 18 years the organization grew to a peak of approximately 300 members in more than a dozen U.S. cities and made important contributions to anti-nuclear, radical ecology, and gender and sexual liberation struggles. The Movement for a New Society (MNS) sought to combine organizing campaigns that utilized direct action tactics with a commitment by its members to “live the revolution now” by transforming themselves and their social relationships, as well as by living collectively and establishing alternative institutions such as food co-ops. Many movement norms and forms of activism that contemporary anti-authoritarians often take for granted—the consensus process, the use of spokescouncils, internal anti-oppression work, and a focus on prefiguring in daily life the world one hopes to win—were either pioneered or heavily promoted by MNS. In 1988 the group dissolved due to the inhospitable political climate and to conflicts and challenges that arose out of MNS’ own innovative group process and strategy. (Read an historical account of Movement for a New Society here.)

Though its experiences are directly relevant to challenges facing radical organizers today, MNS remains relatively unknown. In the summer of 2008 Andy Cornell and Andrew Willis-Garcés interviewed founding member George Lakey as part of an effort to begin evaluating the MNS experience and drawing out lessons for contemporary social justice struggles.

To Read the Interview