Purity on the Left

There are far too many people on the left who have purity issues. They see capitalism as impure (which it is) and try to cut out any connection with it from their lives. This is a DRASTIC MISTAKE. Personally, trying to maintain one's own purity is really self-righteous and selfish. Socially, it removes the influence all of us have over the society we live in. And with regard to the movement it is such SUCH a hindrance to effectively organizing and bringing about change.
To further explain what I am railing against, let me throw out a few examples. I see far too many people on the left simply refusing to befriend people whose ideology is counter to their own... whether they are capitalists or other sects of the left, like Maoists. There is such a stigma against some of these groups that people are afraid to interact or have them around.
<  rant >
(an html joke, for those of you who are wondering what the "" is about)
Life is messy, people. Do not expect to be able to live by one's ideals, it is good to attempt it, but taking it to the level of a dogmatic view of purity is just going to cause pain and turbulence to one and the people around them. Condemning people for their failings will not change them, the only effect it seems to have is it makes people feel superior, which creates such a negative environment.
The biggest failing of the 60s New Left was it's purity driven mentality, it utterly destroyed the movement. Divisions and hatreds developed because people were arrogant enough to believe their way was the only way. I do not want to see that happen again. The greatest success of the New Left, ironically, came from its rank and file members making a compromise between the ideals of the movement and living in a capitalist society. By living differently but still interacting with society at a fundamental level, they have changed American and global culture drastically. So much of the hatreds they railed against in the 60s have much less influence now. Racism is merely the most obvious.
What does this teach us about succeeding as a movement? That it is messy, that you have to have real relationships with people who disagree with you and that you can't shut yourself out of a dirty world for purity's sake. It is like Thomas Merton (a kick-ass activist monk from the 60s, like so many of the prophets of social justice, he died in '68) said, "In the end, it is the power of personal relationships that saves everything." This is literally true, societal change does not come from over-throwing the government, it comes from making friends with people who disagree with you. It comes from convincing young people to change the way they behave. It comes from loving those who you see as your enemy. It does not come from sequestering yourself from the world and not listening to the minds of your fellow humans.

< /rant >

A Revolution is Just a Spinning of the Wheel

I mistrust the notion of revolution.  Far too many people put stock in it as an effective way to change society, but even a brief gloss-over of history tells me that it is not particularly effective. Take Russia for example.  They have had several revolutions in the past 200 years both violent and peaceful, yet they still have an authoritarian government, it may be composed of different people, but it is still essentially the same as the Tsar monarchy or the Soviet-style government. China too, several revolutions, still authoritarian.  Then there are countless third world countries that have had revolutions galore, and we can see how well that has worked out for them. We could take the French revolution as the archetype of revolution.  They overthrew an absolute monarch and large, powerful factions such as the Sansculottes pushed for direct democracy.  The core of the intellectual support for the French revolution supported more democracy, and indeed has inspired the rest of the world with its idealism.  Yet they ended up empowering Napoleon in the near absolute power of an Emperor.   If there were to be a revolution in the typical sense in America, I do not believe it would achieve the ends we desire. 

I am reminded of the analysis provided in 1984 about before Oceania's type of government:  there were always revolutions that would overthrow one group of oligarchs and replace them with another group.  Indeed, a republic is designed to institutionalize this process, stabilizing the switching of control and reducing disruption.  It also stabilizes the groups who maintain power, allowing them to entrench themselves more effectively and simply change places with each other every few years.  Kind of scary to think that a republic, what we have now in America, is an institutionalization of the cycle of revolution.  I am not particularly interesting in changing who has the reigns of power, which may be why I am never had a particular interest in working to elect politicians or bothering rich people to do things.

  

True to its definition, revolution is just the spinning of the wheel, you always end up where you started.  Myself, I am not interested in spinning my wheels... what I want to do is change the wheel itself.  History, again, can aid in understanding this.  There have been numerous wheel-changing events in history, among the most prominent are the industrial revolution and the enlightenment.  They both defined the lenses that the world has been seen through since they came about.  What is phenomenal about them is that they were not specifically directed at the power structures themselves, they were simple shifts in our view of the world and how one acts in it.  

I have come across the idea of wheel changing events before; something that happens that changes everything.  For indigenous populations, exposure to western civilization has been wheel-changing, their cultures are disrupted, and they are often forced to abandon their way of life.  Forced in the military sense, or in the generational shift-sense when the next generation has to stop living the way they did to survive.   But, the best description of a wheel-changing event that I have come across yet comes from literature.  The Riverworld series describes how an ancient society accidentally developed an artificial soul generator that automatically bound souls to new sentient beings.  So, this society changed its newborns without even knowing it, and in the space of only a couple generations, all the beings without these souls were gone because of old age.   This is a great metaphor for generational change.  One generation develops something, the next generation is imbued with it and it becomes an indestructible part of our society.

This seems to be the main wheel-changing method that humanity has at its disposal, and it can be boiled down to mass education, motivation, and changes in each of our ways of life.  To change society, you really have to change the way people think and act, because what else is society but the aggregate of all of our thoughts and actions.  

The industrial revolution was a revolution of mind, it shifted the priorities in life more directly toward profit, productivity and self-interest away from the typical human priority of social networking and the reciprocal economy.  It manifested itself in the day to day behavior of people and in their way of life.  It was compelling enough to spread like a plague across the earth, infecting all those it touched.  

I also think that the 60s was a wheel-changing event in opposition to the industrial revolution's, as it prompted people to change their priorities away from profit.  In fact, I believe that the old sds's long-haul strategy of radicalizing (educating) young people was key in the effectiveness of this specific event.  Without a de-centralized yet organized education and motivation effort, wheel-changing events are much harder to produce.  

Without this hard work of changing minds, we will not see success in our movement.  In the eternal words of Monty Python: "Power is derived from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony."  Too often people on the left focus on the power structures in a society, when we should be focusing on the real power in human society - each other.

A Lesson from History, for My Beloved sds.

One quick thought, which I had while reading historical analysis of the 60s.
There was a huge upsurge in sds recruitment in the post election time period between 1968 and 1971. While this may be attributed to the media attention that the DNC protest of 68 garnered, I think there is another reason that is more plausible. The 1968 election was the population's chance to change the direction of the country. Many people who saw the millions crying out against the war would first try the typical method for changing the direction. When this failed, they would become more cynical about its viability, and look for other methods to change things. Plus none of the standard methods for the rank and file citizenry can change policy (i.e. voting) were coming up soon after the 68 election. So people naturally looked for alternatives, since they tried voting and that didnt work. They saw sds and the new left. While many of them may not have been happy with the yucky sectarianism and negative feelings floating around sds at that time, they were the only game in town. And so, tens of thousands joined.

I am afraid for the future of sds. If whoever is elected fails to end the war (and my cynical side tells me they probably will), then the new sds will be swamped by new recruits, more than we can handle. So, I think our task in the coming year needs to be building the institutional capacity to absorb and teach all these new recruits. And that is one overwhelming task.